SLES 11 vs OpenSuSE 11

After months of throwing books at one another and not talking despite sitting almost back to back, my co-sysadmin and I are starting the next buildout/migration of our Xen virtual cluster at work. One of the big decisions that we’re making is the OS. In the past, we’ve skipped every other version of OpenSuSE (So we’d go 10.3, 11.1, etc.) and migrate about once every year and a half.

For a little bit longer lifespan, we were pondering using SLES11, which just came out. It’s got a number of package differences — more updated and heavily tested software, just like SLES 10sp2 is superior in many ways to OpenSuSE 10.3 and in some cases 11 when you’re just looking at package versions. We also liked the idea that it might be a bit more tested and a bit less “Your mission critical application is my 2nd year undergraduate Google Summer of Code” …

I expected the SLES install to go a lot more easily than it did. There’s a few weird default settings (such as using a bridged network interface by default, which I couldn’t get to work at all) and the selections of what kind of host to build don’t seem to make a lot of sense, as they typically install the same exact things.

Unfortunately, we’re missing a vital piece for our current operating structure. At the moment, we make heavy use of OCFS2 and Heartbeat (aka Pacemaker) for EVMS. We’re moving away from EVMS since development has stopped/stalled on it, but it’s still necessary right now with some of the automated provisioning tools we use. With heartbeat still necessary, it was rather dissapointing to find out that Novell hasn’t released packages for SLES11 yet… they’ll be released as part of the High Availability Extension, which ironically enough, is not yet available.

Today’s chore: Figure out if we can get up and running fast enough without those toys, or if we have to “fall back” to OpenSuSE.