[CentOS-devel] First round of RHEL programs announced

Am 28.01.21 um 21:55 schrieb Gena Makhomed:
> On 28.01.2021 14:54, Neal Gompa wrote:
> 
>> On Thu, Jan 28, 2021 at 6:22 AM Gena Makhomed <gmm at csdoc.com> wrote:
> 
>>> What is about running in the one bare metal RHEL server virtual machines
>>> with different subscription owners? For example, run in production on
>>> one bare metal server 16 VMs with subscription owner Alice, and 16 VMs
>>> with subscription owner Bob, and 16 VMs with subscription owner Carl,
>>> and so on. Are such configurations legal and allowed or not? I didn't
>>> find any limitations on the blog article, but for sure and for future I
>>> need a clean and unambiguous answer from Red Hat.
>>>
>>> If such configurations are allowed - this is a legal workaround for a
>>> limit of 16 no-cont RHEL instances. For example, a small company, with
>>> 50 employees can absolutely legally have free and no-cost 800 RHEL
>>> servers in self-support mode. Company with 100 employees can have 1600
>>> free no-cost RHEL servers in self-support mode and so on.
>>>
>>> If such configurations are forbidden (on what basis?) - I have no choice
>>> but to migrate from free CentOS and no-cost RHEL to Oracle Linux or Alma
>>> Linux or Rocky Linux.
>>>
>>> And in the future if my company grows and I will need to buy commercial
>>> support - I will be forced by Red Hat's decision to buy subscriptions
>>> for Oracle Linux from the Oracle Corporation?
>>>
>>> Is this the real goal of the no-cost RHEL 16 instance limit - force
>>> CentOS users migrate to Oracle Linux?
> 
>> Brian Exelbierd explained this whole thing quite well on the Ask Noah
>> Show[1]. The answer to this is that what you're saying is perfectly
>> allowed. The bet here is that this is sufficiently costly, risky, and
>> a hassle (who wants to manage 100+ Red Hat accounts? I know I wouldn't!)
>> that the company in question would decide to purchase RHEL
>> subscriptions from Red Hat, especially after experiencing the value
>> that Red Hat provides (Red Hat Insights, live kernel patching, etc.).
> 
> But did you know the minimal price of one RHEL Server subscription?
> 
> ~ 350 USD/year.
> 
> So, subscription for 100 servers/VMs will be cost 35_000 USD/year.
> 
> Every year. For 10 years price of 100 subscriptions is 350_000 USD.
> 
> You don't need 100 Red Hat accounts, for 100 server subscriptions.
> 
> For 112 RHEL Server subscriptions you need only 7 Red Hat accounts.
> 
> 16 * 7 == 112.
> 
> Managing 7 Red Hat accounts really is sufficiently costly, risky,
> and a hassle? I don't see any problems with such work for 7 accounts.
> 
> For 1600 servers minimal commercial price is 560_000 USD/year.
> and price is 5_600_000 USD for 10 year subscription. For 1600 servers.
> 
> Managing 100 Red Hat accounts really is sufficiently costly, risky,
> and a hassle? This work cost more then 5_600_000 USD for 10 years?
> 
> I don’t understand one thing, if it is so easy to get workaround
> these restrictions of 16 no-cost RHEL instances and at the same time
> bypassing these restrictions is completely legal - why were these
> restrictions introduced at all?
> 
> So that CentOS users should think about whether they should
> switch to no-cost RHEL, or maybe they should think about switching
> to completely free variant of Enterprise Linux from Oracle, which
> does not have such restrictions on the number of no-cost instances
> and don't need any subscriptions for seamless work at all?
> 
> As previously CentOS Linux users live (mostly) without commercial
> subscription and support from RHEL, the same in the future,
> they can live with no-cost Oracle Linux (mostly) without
> commercial subscription.
> 
> If user of mass installation of Oracle Linux in future need commercial
> support - he/she will buy commercial support from Oracle Corporation,
> not from Red Hat/IBM. It's obvious, isn't it? Money will go to Oracle.


And what the calculation for OL subscriptions?


> This is some kind of strange situation when the Enterprise Linux
> was created by Red Hat staff and Fedora community, but the Oracle 
> Corporation will make additional money on it, because this is where
> a large number of CentOS users can/will go in current situation.
> 
>> What I would have liked to see is the addition of some generic
>> low-cost subscription options that would be sufficiently below the
>> floor to fit with even low-margin businesses so that as a business
>> grows from 16, to 50, to 100, to 1000, and so on, the company would
>> continue to use RHEL and continue to support the awesome work Red Hat
>> does. Right now, the current pricing is so unbelievably expensive that
>> I would instead just convert the boxes from RHEL to CentOS Stream
>> after a certain threshold.
> 
> CentOS Stream is just a beta-version for next minor RHEL release.
> 
> CentOS Stream is not ready for production, see for example,
> bugreport https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1913806
> - this bug is present in CentOS Stream 8, but absent in CentOS 8.3.


Not sure but maybe because systemd-nspawn is not supported?

--
Leon