[nycbug-talk] Mixed RHEL / FreeBSD environment
Pete Wright
pete at nomadlogic.org
Mon Mar 23 19:40:23 EDT 2009
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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