Real benefits of RHEL over Fedora?

[Alex]

Hi,

> I don't know if you don't care about the following, or don't know about
> it:
>
> When it comes to servers, it's a major pain to have to update the
> operating system, and software, on a regular basis.  And Fedora has a
> very short lifespan.  Leaving you with having to keep on backing up and
...

Yes, thanks, I should have mentioned that I was already aware of the
short lifespan and the constant need for updates with fedora.

None of the servers I will be building will have Xorg installed, so
this should make upgrading significantly easier, should I choose the
fedora path. This is a pretty critical server in the role that it will
be implemented, so stability is a concern, but it's really only
performing basic email and web functions which are pretty well tested
in fedora.

A few other general notes/observations:

- Are there improvements made to RHEL beyond what is available in the
most stable version of fedora? Does RHEL effectively use the same
kernel as some version of fedora? In other words, once the kernel has
been time-tested on fedora, doesn't it become the basis for the RHEL
kernel? Are there kernel, filesystem, or memory tuning improvements
that don't ever appear in fedora?

- I think if it was just a matter of stripping out the trademark
stuff, CentOS would be released much more closely to the RHEL release
than it is, so I suspect there is more to it than that.

- It appears RH does not add new features through the seven year
lifespan of RHEL, only security and bug fixes, so I would most likely
have to upgrade more frequently anyway. In other words, the hardware I
install RHEL on initially won't be the hardware I'm using seven years
later.

- I believe the fedora lifespan for security updates is at least a
couple of years, correct?

- Much of the focus for RHEL seems to be on virtual machines, not
installing on the bare metal. Is that correct? What is a "socket" as
referred to in the RHEL subscription information? Does this just mean
an available processor on the server for that virtual machine?

Thanks,
Alex