Hi all, Can you guys give me insight to this gentleman's email? Seems RH can't cut the mustard, so they are looking for alternatives. I am not sure if SuSE can fit the bill either, but believe they can. I am including his information from his emails, as he is not a list member. If anyone has any info to offer him, please respond directly to him or me. Also, if contacting SuSE directly would help in resolving their concerns/problems, pass along that info. Thanks for you help. Eric Singer's first mail: Hi everyone, It's been a while since I posted or been to any meetings, but I plan on changing all of that soon. The company I work for is considering the purchase of a two node Linux cluster with share storage between the two nodes. The objective of this is two fold. The first is to prove the Linux will work well in our environment for our next generation of server purchases. We're currently running Sun servers with Solaris 8. The second is for us to move off two Oracle database instances to this two node cluster to give us a little breathing room on our Sun cluster. We've been looking very heavily at the Redhat Enterprise Server distribution. It looks like has all the support and stability that we need for a production environment, however we had a nasty wakeup call that has somewhat derailed our purchase proposal. We spoke with another company that has already purchased the same hardware and software that we're considering and although Redhat Linux itself is very stable, their having a nightmare of a time with the clustering software that in the Redhat distribution. They've reported to us that for no apparent reason, the cluster software decides to perform a failover from the primary node to the secondary node. They have Redhat support involved with their problem, but there's no resolution as of yet. Their combination of software is different than what we'd be running on our cluster, so we're not sure whether we can trust this information or not. Does any one out there have any experience with failover clustering in Linux? If so what are you running as far as clustering software and application software? Thanks, Eric Singer UNIX Systems Administrator Replacements, LTD esinger@replacements.com ----------------------------- Second mail: Hi Patrick, Thanks for the response. I run SuSE at home myself, so I do lean towards them as well. My manager uses Redhat and he leans their way, however if SuSE has better failover clustering software than Redhat then that might push him over to SuSE's side. My manager's rational for looking at Redhat is the following: 1) It has a bigger market share in Linux. 2) He believes their 24x7 support would be based the US (as opposed to some companies that I've dealt with that have after hours support in India or Asia, the language barrier can be quite a challenge). 3) Redhat is North Carolina based, so we could drive down the road if we ever need to see them in person. I'm okay with you posting to the SuSE list. Just explain to them that we're looking at purchasing a two node cluster with shared storage between the two nodes (more than likely a Dell solution). The application that we'll be running will be Oracle 9i. We're not interested in Oracle RAC. If you took a look at the pricing for Oracle Real Application Cluster you'd know why, list price would be $240,000.00 for this small cluster. So to give us High Availability we're looking a failover cluster where one node is actively running Oracle and the other is ready to take on Oracle if the first node fails. Thanks! Eric Singer ====================== Thanks all for your help Patrick -- --- KMail v1.5.2 --- SuSE Linux Pro v8.2 --- Registered Linux User #225206 On any other day, that might seem strange...