Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 available

[Posted November 10, 2010 by corbet]

It's official: RHEL6 is available. "Enhancements range from kernel improvements for resource management, RAS, performance, scalability, virtualization and power saving, through a greatly extended and standards-compliant development environment, to a comprehensive range of updated server and desktop applications. It is designed to improve agility, lower costs and reduce IT complexity for customers."

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 available

Posted Nov 11, 2010 18:46 UTC (Thu) by elanthis (guest, #6227) [Link] (1 responses)

And now those of us who can't afford (or just don't want to pay for) multi-thousand dollar service contracts for our hundreds of servers must start the long wait for CentOS 6. :)

CentOS

Posted Nov 12, 2010 10:26 UTC (Fri) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link]

or help it?

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 available

Posted Nov 12, 2010 15:30 UTC (Fri) by aysabzevar (guest, #65759) [Link]

Viva red hat, the world's open source leader.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 available

Posted Nov 12, 2010 16:08 UTC (Fri) by ESRI (guest, #52806) [Link] (3 responses)

.. and with it, new pricing. Notably missing is the "Basic" option, replaced by "self-support".

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 available

Posted Nov 13, 2010 23:02 UTC (Sat) by mfedyk (guest, #55303) [Link]

and the desktop has gotten cheaper. from $ 80 to $ 50.

Where is the value?

Posted Nov 15, 2010 9:22 UTC (Mon) by buchanmilne (guest, #42315) [Link] (1 responses)

I noticed some significant changes in the pricing, which aren't covered on that page. The Reg has an article covering some differences. The pricing on the store only provides 2-socket and 4-socket pricing, whereas the pricing guide has some more interesting/worrying aspects

Pricing is now per-socket-pair, where on the RHEL5-based model, Advanced Platform was for any server with more sockets.
Advanced Platform (at $1500, or $2500 with premium support) previously came with Cluster and GFS
Standard previously allowed 4 guests (plus hypervisor), whereas it now only allows one guest at the same pricing, support for 4 guests costs about 80% more.
Advanced Platform (at $1500, or $2500 with premium support) previously allowed unlimited guests, now it costs $3249 per socket-pair
Management entitlements are now also variable-priced, whereas before I believe they were priced the same (IOW, cheaper).

We built a virtualisation cluster on RHEL 5.1 with Xen, using 8-socket dual-core AMD-based servers from Sun (X4600 M2s), which still have a few years of useful life on them. On RHEL 5-era pricing, this was costing $1500 per server per year. With the new pricing, it would cost ($1999(unlimited guests)+$399(cluster)+$799(GFS))*4 = $12788 per server per year, an 850% increase. And this without any management entitlement, and no RHEV subscription (if required, and where do we find these prices now?).

It really seems as if Red Hat is trying to compete with VMWare on pricing .. but I still don't see that the offering is competitive feature-wise.

While for new servers, multi-core CPUs mean it isn't really necessary to buy socket-dense servers, what are existing RH users with > 4 sockets to do? Even for (e.g., new) 4-socket servers, the pricing has more than quadrupled (at $6394 vs again, $1500).

If we consider other alternatives, Oracle VM support is $1199 per system per year (unlimited sockets, unlimited guests) and Oracle Linux Network subscriptions are $119 per system per year (unlimited sockets, unlimited guests), so $1318 per system, or less than a quarter of the price for a 4-socket system, and less than an eighth the price for an 8-way system.

The RHEL5-era offering was very attractive, you could easily justify not going with the "industry leader" for virtualisation, however with the new "improved" pricing, why not just go with a company your CIO already trusts (Oracle or VMWare), it may even be cheaper.

Or, does RHEV pricing have nothing at all to do with RHEL pricing? Who knows, I'll have to contact sales to even get an idea, and since I'm not in procurement, I'm not really allowed to talk to sales people myself ...

Where is the value?

Posted Nov 15, 2010 20:33 UTC (Mon) by ESRI (guest, #52806) [Link]

Hmm, I didn't even notice the changes to Advanced Platform. Not getting GFS2 and clustering along with the "package" is a real downer. Probably time to take a second look at Solaris and AWS.