Red Hat

Hi,

I have built out a new virtual production environment (VMWare, HA enabled, VMotion... all the bells & whistles) using RHEL5 VM's.

I have got another ESX host that I plan to use as a pre-prod environment. To save some costs on RH subs I was thinking about installing this environment using CentOS. I believe it uses the same kerenl as RH?

Has anybody got any thoughts advise regarding this?

Is it a good idea or not?

R,
D

I would not do it. CentOS does not exactly match RHEL in many respects. I would want my pre-production environment to be exactly the same as my production system in order to ensure accurate testing of applications, etc.

Yes mainly they use same kernel and packages.

As fpmurphy said pre-production environment should be the same.

I think you can use Centos only if you know what you doing, like if you know your services enough - what libs, lib versions they use and how use.

But also I don`t see why you need that depravity - use RHEL also on test environment?!

What aspects are you referring to? AFAIK the only difference in CentOS is the lack of RedHat Network and the name RedHat in some messages.

> AFAIK the only difference in CentOS is the lack of RedHat Network and the name RedHat in some messages.

Huh, their branding is completely different. It is more than just some messages are different.

CentOS often lags Red Hat by weeks or even months in their releases and updates. CentOS repos often contain different packages that Red Hat repos.

I agree that your pre-production should as closely match production as possible. On the other hand I have worked on environments where just what you describe was done, the only "trick" we needed was adding a dummy /etc/redhat-release entry for oracle to install... We would occasionally run into various library and compat mismatches as well.