Upgrades driving me crazy....

[Michael Pawlowsky]

Are there any other people using FC in a production enterprise  
environment?

The constant upgrades are driving me nuts. We have machines at FC8-FC9- 
FC10 and FC-11.

The main reason we are using FC is because one it's free (in a sense).
The next one is that it does include more recent versions of packages  
that we use and are looking for the latest versions to take advantage  
of some new features and so on.

But now since FC8 is no longer being supported, it has caused some  
real issues. One main one is that yum is not updated and even rpm  
packages that we create ourselves will no longer install on it.

We've been through this before since we've been using FC ever since in  
broke out of RH.

So basically we are in a never ending cycles of upgrades. And since we  
have had bad experiences trying to upgrade over the last version, our  
policy is to back up the data, re-install and put back in all the data.

I'm thinking of trying ESXi to make installing quicker. Reconfigure an  
new image locally, clone it and push it to the virtual server.

Also, I am wondering why it is not possible to simply keep upgrading  
packages, kernel and so on, as opposed to coming up with new versions  
every six months.

To make things more difficult, our servers need to be up 24/7.

Is FC simply a bad choice for enterprise production.

I'm starting to want to try CentOS soon. Unfortunately this will mean  
not always being able to take advantage of the latest features in  
software and so on.

So I was just wondering what other people in this situation do?