Real benefits of RHEL over Fedora?

[Ian Pilcher]

On 06/05/2011 07:42 PM, Alex wrote:
> For something like this, will there be a great performance benefit to
> using RHEL over fedora? Is the kernel that much different that it
> would make a significant difference? Both would use ext4 for the
> filesystem. Both would use the same spamassassin and postfix
> versions...

The big benefit of RHEL is stability, not performance.  For you, this
probably means a *lot* less time spent administering the system.  Fedora
releases have a support (i.e. security updates and bug fixes) lifespan
of about a year; for RHEL it's 7 years.  This means that even if you
skip every other Fedora release, you're likely to do about 5 Fedora
version upgrades during a lifetime of a RHEL release.  Every one of
those versions can potentially introduce configuration file changes or
other incompatibilities that will require you to figure out how to set
up some aspect of your system again.  (Or they may not; there's really
no way to know.)

> I recall reading that CentOS is having trouble keeping up with the
> latest RHEL. Is this currently a problem? Any input on whether future
> updates will be delayed as well?

CentOS 5.6 was released several months after RHEL 5.6, and CentOS 6
still hasn't been released.  (RHEL 6.1 was just recently released.)

As they say in the investment business, "past performance is no
guarantee of future results."  I don't think anyone can really say
with confidence what the future holds for any of the distributions
that are derived from RHEL sources.

(For the sake of full disclosure, I do work for Red Hat.  Hopefully,
everything I've written above is relatively uncontroversial.)

-- 
========================================================================
Ian Pilcher                                         arequipeno at gmail.com
"If you're going to shift my paradigm ... at least buy me dinner first."
========================================================================