Hi Hans-Peter, in terms of management, what are the improvements you would like to see in openSUSE that would have a bigger impact in your everyday work as administrator of this deployment? On Monday 23 July 2012 19:48:35 Hans-Peter Jansen wrote:
Dear Ludwig,
Am Wednesday 11 July 2012 09:28:15 schrieb Ludwig Nussel:
Hi,
I'm currently investigating whether and how openSUSE is used in larger deployments. Does anyone know someone who manages like let's say 30 or more openSUSE machines at once? I'm interested in e.g. what tools are used in such a scenario and what rough edges in the distro we maybe have that could be improved.
I'm responsible for an installation with 30 clients and two servers in a transport company, everything is (still) openSUSE driven (apart from a bunch of VMware XP vm's running ontop).
_All_ clients are diskless, a kiwi setup is tweaked to cope/use the aufs2 patched kernel. It's a real pity, that the kernel team opted for outphasing aufs a long time ago. It's still the stablest solution, when it comes to run nfs3 based diskless full featured desktops (including XP under VMware).
The client distibution is installed with a python script, that runs zypper, applies some patches, and prepares the clients layer. The installation target is a nfs exported directory on the server, each client runs on his own rw filesystem layer ontop. That way, I can easily manage/modify every client on his own without affecting others, while still being able to apply updates in a single place once and for all.
Since we use multihead setups (up to _3_ * 24' heads), we selected nvidia as our favorized gpu, driven by the closed source drivers (a decision made back in 2005).
A single, but pretty important win32 module is driven by wine to access a transport trading exchange (Timocom).
We still use 11.1 and KDE3. Unfortunately, the KDE team has lost track, when it comes to business users needs (imap is not integrated in desktop search engines, kaddressbook is neither company aware (one company to many individuals, nor branch aware), and lacks a sql database backend. kmail is full of minor issues in such a setting.
We had a couple of very nagging LibreOffice issues, and still have some.
Let me note, that this setup is the third one in a row, both predecessors were SuSE based, too, and the immediate one was aufs based already. The first one dates back to 1999.
It biggest advantage of this setup is flexibility, while managing it is pretty lightweight. Adding or exchanging systems is done in a few seconds. Automatic X setup is flaky, hence multihead setup has to be done manually. I fear, that the sax2-less versions will further complicate this issue.
Changing things has to be done very conservatively, since such an environment doesn't tolerate a lot of experimenting, and time is constrained. For that reason, the short release cycles of openSUSE are a real pain. OTOH, the advantage of the professional desktop products isn't that big, given the many deviations from the original product over time.
Back in 2.4 times, we had setups, that were rock solid - desktops running diskless for month without reboot, including VMware vm's.
Generally, I notice decreasing long term stability in a lot of areas, that really disturb me and that prepare the fields for Redmonds takeover.
Cheers, Pete -- Agustin Benito Bethencourt openSUSE Team Lead at SUSE abebe@suse.com -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org