On 05/30/2016 12:26 PM, stratacast1 wrote:
>
> Hello ladies and gents. I have a small business wanting me to do set up
> a server(s) for data storage (ownCloud) and as a web server, and I have
> been considering openSUSE to get the job done. I haven’t been the
> biggest fan of openSUSE for my own personal use (just feels too full of
> admin tools for me), but the large set of tools has intrigued me for use
> as an admin and server/network management. I have my mind set on this
> distro above others because of the tools and more up to date software
> packages. I was wondering what others think of using openSUSE as a
> server OS and how it has been for them. I would like to know about
> stability and also what you guys think of the 3 year support cycle. 3
I’ve used it as a VM host (KVM primarily today) and as a regular host both
in my own and various online (“cloud”, AWS EC2 and Google Compute)
environments and stability has been great. I have not had any stability
issues for several years, and before that I used SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.
> years feels short for me, and the time is now less being over half a
> year post release. If I use this until Leap 43 and need to upgrade, what
> is the way that’s done that causes the least downtime? I figure the best
This will depend a lot on what you are doing on the box. One of the nice
things about virtualization and Linux is that it’s pretty easy to copy
services from system to system, then turn off old and turn on new very
quickly. I have done a lot of these type of “migrations” recently to
maximize uptime since the only downtime is as I stop the service on the
old box, move the clustered IP over, and start it on the new box. Seconds
of downtime is a lot nicer, and to me much less risky, than an in-place
upgrade/migration with reboots, kernel changes, etc.
> answer will be a clean install which is really my largest concern. With
> that in mind, will that make openSUSE not a good candidate for me?
I have done both types of upgrades, in-place upgrades and migrations and
have had good luck with both. I use openSUSE on all of my systems these
days, other than the systems using SLES, including my primary laptop which
runs my life (this box), so I have built up a lot of confidence in the
patching process, including the regular upgrades.
I do not think you can do much better than SUSE-based stuff for work,
whether that’s as a base for Docker containers, using other containers
virtualization (LXC), or full virtualization with KVM or similar. The
tools you mentioned make it a very powerful distribution, with a strong
community, and great web-based tools like the Open Build Service (OBS).
If you fire up a VM in the cloud there are systems out there from which
you can quickly/easily setup a system in just a few minutes.
–
Good luck.
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