[nycbug-talk] Mixed RHEL / FreeBSD environment

Pete Wright pete at nomadlogic.org
Mon Mar 23 20:00:01 EDT 2009


yea no problem - i reckon you should be ok.  although at the end of  
the day it's probably how comfortable you all feel supporting freebsd,  
and if you all have any linux'ism in your code you'll need to port.   
since it's php - you should be all set.

hope your migration goes well...i'm actually in the middle of  
something similar right now :)

-p

On 23-Mar-09, at 4:45 PM, matt at atopia.net wrote:

> Pete,
>
> Thanks for your help. The only thing that would run rhel would be  
> the DB setup. ALL webs would be freebsd. So we wouldn't be using  
> multiple OS's on the same class of box.
>
> M
>
> ------Original Message------
> From: Pete Wright
> To: Matt Juszczak
> Cc: talk at lists.nycbug.org
> Subject: Re: [nycbug-talk] Mixed RHEL / FreeBSD environment
> Sent: Mar 23, 2009 19:40
>
>
> On 23-Mar-09, at 4:00 PM, Matt Juszczak wrote:
>
>> Hi all,
>>
>> Has anyone ever tried a mixed RHEL and FreeBSD environment?  We're
>> 100%
>> RHEL right now, but migrating to a new data center.  Considering the
>> options and the amount of BSD fans in the mix, we'd like to switch at
>> least the lower trafficked boxes (utility boxes, jump boxes, etc.) to
>> FreeBSD.  We are also debating making our webs FreeBSD, because of
>> some
>> research that shows Apache seems to run nicely on FreeBSD compared
>> to RHEL
>> (if not better in certain circumstances).
>>
>> 100% FreeBSD is not an option, for the fact that for now, we're
>> going to
>> keep our database boxes (which will only have a LAN connection) RHEL.
>> This is because of the recent issues with FreeBSD and MySQL
>> performance
>> vs. RHEL.  We've done our own testing, and have had good results,
>> but feel
>> like coupling a data center migration AND an OS change on the DB
>> servers
>> (where we are most likely to have performance problems) is too many
>> changes at once.
>>
>> What are everyone's thoughts?  Is a potentially mixed environment  
>> like
>> this potentially beneficial?  Stupid?  I'm also very curious to know
>> of
>> people's research on Apache/PHP with FreeBSD vs. Linux.
>>
>
>
> Hi Matt,
> I don't think having a heterogenous environment is inherently evil  
> per-
> se.  Having worked in a pretty heterogenous environment (several IRIX
> flavours, several RHEL versions as well as sun, NT, OSX) I found that
> if you have a decent provisioning, asset mgmt and config mgmt
> infrastructure in place that will make managing the environment much
> much easier.  granted - all those things will help managing any
> environment won't they? :)
>
> From a high level POV - i'd just suggest that you keep your OS's
> homogenous from an application or service perspective.  Having a mixed
> hat of FreeBSD, RHEL httpd instances for the same application can get
> a little unruly and harder to manage.  Yet if you have a pool of
> FreeBSD httpd's hitting a layer of RHEL app servers and mysql
> instances that *should* help mitigate some of the complexity.
>
> just my two bits...
>
> -p
>




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