Comparison and Contrast: Red Hat or Suse - Term Paper Example

? Red Hat or Suse Comparison and Contrast: Red Hat or Suse Both SUSE and Red hat have a graphical installation manager but that’s all that is common with the two with their installation logic being totally different. Red hat installation is easier for a newcomer to understand and follow but when it comes to SUSE the going isn’t as easy since it requires a bit of knowledge of Linux as it is rich in the KDE-style installation manager . also the fact that some key applications in SUSE are not installed by default, one needs to be cautious at the time of installation not to miss them out. Another difference that comes out clearly is that Red hat comes with Gnome while SUSE comes with KDE and the fact is that SUSE’s KDE interface is faster than Gnome and it is very hard for one to go back to Red hat after a stunt with the SUSE counterpart. The most annoying of Red hat is its slow running of applications even though it has a perfect architecture of its Gnome. The slowness may be as a result of the fact that thee general configuration is not okay as opposed to the Gnome itself. LINUX MARKET SHARE GENERAL COMPARISON Red hat’s theme of Bluecurve is not efficient since it does not hide that open source applications come from here. SUSE’s own window decoration together with KDE’s keramik icons are so efficient together thus KDE and Gnome applications blend in together very well. Another advantage going to SUSE is the fact that it is a very good working clipboard as opposed to the Red hat’s lack of an integrated copy and paste solution such that if a person wants to copy a text and try pasting it in another application, it usually ends in one finding the clipboard empty. Irritating is an understatement to this scenario. SUSE has integrated its system control tools much better than Red hat since the control tools are divided into two sets, one for the system hardware and it goes by the name YAST and the other one for KDE. Red hat on the other hand has very little or minimal control over hardware, the boot loader and the other areas/ parts of the system since the Gnome controls are scattered everywhere. The other similarities and differences are as follow in the statements and paragraphs below. Red hat Linux focuses on the attributes that follow: Offering a highly optimized application for large-scale, centrally-managed enterprise deployment, industry-leading virtualization performance, flexibility, security for both host and guest environment, the provision of a platform that offers clients access to better technology in the life time of the product, and provides the best efficiency with the latest generation of system which are scalable. There are various features that define Red Hat (Haynes, 2009). Such features, and which vary to some extent from Suse include the following: kernel and core technology stack, virtualization, performance, client/desktop, development, scalability, and security. The first features to examine is kernel and core technology stack. It provides the user with an updated core, including the operating system kernel, compiler and development tools, libraries, and drivers and not forgetting applications such as nfs, http, samba etc. It has been the leading developer and contributor of technology to the Linux kernel for many years and uses them to come up with a kernel that encompasses a comprehensive set of strength capabilities in the enterprise (Davenport, 2009). Its design allows for future capabilities to be included and incorporated into it without impacting certified applications and this is possible by keeping APIs/ ABIs stable. The benefit of this is that it provides a platform for future incorporation of the latest open source technologies in a state-of-the-art solution. ISVs enjoy a stable, flexible environment on which to launch and support their applications. Thus the end user achieve the maximum return on their investment in IT, with features that give the maximum and proper utilization of resources and rapid absorption of new technologies. Red hat’s key position as the primary contributor to the Linux kernel means that it is the number one open source operating system and that it is the best choice for professional, supported deployment. Virtualization: Red hat includes integrated virtualization based on the KVM hypervisor. This tight visualization means that KVM benefits from many core kernel features including the groups and the CFQ (complete fair queuing) scheduler (Haynes, 2009). Also it spearheading in KVM development has resulted in the development of sophisticated Para virtualization capabilities that encompass non-traditional devices e.g. the clock, interrupt controller, channel and spinlock. The above also improve scalability, I/O performance and deployment flexibility. The application environment is also in line with physical and virtual systems, simplifying the adoption of virtualization. The support of features e.g. virtualized asynchronous I/O, transparent huge pages, SR-IOV, and message signaled interrupts deliver performance improvements for all clients, from the largest enterprise application to the windows desktop. Scalability increases include more memory and cpu’s per guest, more guest/server. Also to ensure forward compatibility, red hat is able to run as a full or Para virtualized Xen guest on Linux based hosts. Scalability and performance enhancement make it reasonably practical to deploy large-scale enterprise applications in virtualized environments, combining the improved and best features of virtualized and physical systems (Davenport, 2009). SR-IOV enabled performance improvement allows I/O bound applications to be virtualized, thus the IT sector can adopt an ‘execute anywhere’ capability. Support of red hat guests allows rapid deployment and easy management of heterogeneous environments. Performance: This feature reaches all components of the platform e.g. per-LUN flush daemons that allow dramatic performance improvement for enterprise applications deployed on large I/O subsystems, kernel multi-queue network device support used in providing QoS-based transmission and virtualization performance improvement etc (Fowler, 2003). Customers get industry-leading performance across all aspect of red hat environment: networking, processor, storage, file system, virtualization, daemons and applications. Client/Desktop: Client support improvement concentrates on two areas: The native Linux desktop i.e. support for Open change allowing MAPI access to Microsoft exchange servers, reduced boot times, graphics improvement. VDI/HVD(virtual desktop infrastructure/ hosted virtual desktop) i.e. enabling centralized hosting. Of both Microsoft windows and red hat desktops, optimized for to date multimedia environments (Haynes, 2009). Red hat’s solutions provide a fully functional desktop that can be used to replace Microsoft windows, giving excellent compatibility and superior security. The SPICE protocol enables low-cost, hosted thin clients to offer the same user experience and performance as a local client while reducing hardware, deployment and management costs. Development: The GCC compiler provides Open MP conformance, allowing developers to create portable, parallel programs. It also provides C++ conformance features and debugging info handling improvements. The System tap tracing and profiling utility take advantage of pre-configured kernel trace points, C++ and java user-space probing and backtracking (Davenport, 2009). Analysis of core system performance can be aided by using PCL to profile processor hardware operations. The Eclipse IDE offers java, C and C++ development enhancements and new integration with Val ring and Oprofile. ISVs and customers enjoy a modern application development environment in which to create, build, debug and tune their applications. Scalability: For Red hat, scalability is essential and the features are not restricted to physical systems i.e. it provides industry-leading scalability of virtual guests. Virtual, cloud and physical deployments can scale to meet business requirements thus eliminating the need to switch platforms when an existing platform reaches its maximum capacity. Security: Svirt, enabled by default provides containment and isolation of virtual guests. Xace brings Multi-level Security (MLS) capabilities to desktop environments (Fowler, 2003). The Sandboxing feature allow users to contain potentially insecure applications while the Kiosk capability allows constrained, read-only environments to be created for use in public/ kiosk settings, reducing the risk of system compromise by malicious users. Lastly, Policy kit provides fine-grained authorization for user application that need to do privilege operations. The features of Suse include: virtualization, green it, and security. The first feature to look at is virtualization. Suse comes with Xen, the integrated hypervisor-based virtualization technology (Davenport, 2009). It has an unlimited number of guests’ operating systems at no extra charge across all subscription. It also has a virtualization management i.e. Novell ZEN works, orchestrator and ZEN works Virtual Machine Management. Orchestrator allows users to manage a group of servers. ZEN works Virtual Machine provides for: live migration for Para virtualized guests and it is also a host-based management interface for VM management (Haynes, 2009). Security: This means first restricting access to the user accounts and services on that system and checking that no one got around the defense. Open Suse is designed to be secured by default meaning no user accounts with blank passwords, that the firewall is restricted by default and that most network services e.g. web, FTP etc are off by default even if their software is installed. Commands related to those features include App Armor-ensures that exploitation of one application cannot be used to breach other areas e.g. if intruders were to compromise the web daemon, they wouldn’t necessarily be able to compromise the rest of the system; AIDE (advanced intrusion detection environment)-takes a snapshot of all the files on the system, then later use the snapshot to find if any of those files have been changed. Green It: New and enhanced features, tools and APIs are focused on reducing the power footprint. These include: use of tickles kernel that allows switching of processors to a low power state when idle; active state power management and aggressive link power management, reducing the power consumption of I/O subsystems; real-time drive access optimization, which reduces file system metadata write overhead (Fowler, 2003). Comparison of the Suse and Red Hat Systems Reflecting on the above discussion, it is notable that these systems have a high degree of interoperability with other platforms including windows. This is enhanced by inclusion of the Samba which offers a number of significant new and updated features. Support is provided for IPV6, windows 2008, active directory LDAP signing/ sealing policy and windows 7 domain members (Davenport, 2009). Other supports include full support for transitive trusts and one-way domain trusts is available and support for management tools which is improved. And deployment in virtualized and clustered configurations add flexibility and availability thus enabling customers to build compatible, highly cost effective and heterogeneous solutions that are robust. File systems and storage: the optional XFS file system is available for customers deploying even larger, specialized environments with high-end servers and storage arrays. The optional GFS2 file system is designed for high-availability clusters with 2-16 nodes, and include support for interconnects (FCoE, iSCSI etc) and hardware/ software optimization. LVM (logical volume manager) enhancement s includes online resizing of mirrored volumes, dynamic multipath load balancing and snapshots rollbacks. Networking: focused on increasing performance and extending the support of industry standards and RFC requirements. The features include IPV6 mobility; UDP-lite ; addition of TCP congestion control algorithm; performance with multi-CPU receive, multi-queue transmit and the extended use of read copy update( RCU) (Fowler, 2003). Identity and authentication: features include built-in caching of identity information and credentials; offline support and improved robustness in the face of network congestion also including support for multiple identity domains allowing clients to authenticate correctly in mixed identity environments. Differences between Suse and Red Hat Systems With reference to the above comparison, one can deduce that there are few differences that exist between these systems. For instance, it is recorded that Red hat’s pricing structure for RHEL5 server and RHEL5 advanced platform makes it more competitive with SUSE Linux enterprise server pricing. Suse Linux enterprise server enables an unlimited number of guest operating systems while RHEL5 server supports only four guest operating systems. RHEL5 server is targeted at smaller users, not enterprise users. Suse has an advantage over red hat since it provides ZEN works virtual machine management that allows users to manage a group of physical servers, not just Novell servers and virtual machines in a data center unlike red hat’s virtualization management tools which are integrated with RHEL making them useful only for Red hat systems (Haynes, 2009). References Davenport, T. (2009). ‘Reengineering Revisited.’ Computerworld Management. 12(2): 34-46. Haynes, S.(2009). Ed. Explanation in Information Systems: A Design Rationale Approach. Pgs 1-34. Retrieved from http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/informationSystems//pdf/theses/haynes.pdf Fowler, M. (2003). Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture. New York: Addison-Wesley Professional. Read More