[Beowulf] Any Experiences of dealing with Red Hat Technical support for RHEL on Clusters

[Andrew D. Fant]

Afternoon all,
    I am under a certain amount of pressure to redesign a cluster I have
built using a free Linux distribution to be based upon Red Hat
Enterprise Linux.  One of the major drivers for this is supposedly
having the Red Hat Technical Support to deal with problems.  I am
curious if anyone on the list has built a cluster on top of RHEL (either
using the "official" Red Hat way or layering their own tools) and if
they would be willing to share their experiences of dealing with Red Hat
Technical Support.  In particular, were they competent and helpful, or
did they keep echoing back "I'm sorry, that is not a supported
configuration. Do it our way" and make you fix whatever problem you had
yourself.  I realize that commercial vendors need some degree of
consistency in their configurations to make support viable, but I have
also known entirely too many vendors who use it as an easy way to avoid
actually providing service.

Thanks,
	Andy