[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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