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

[Guy Coates]

On Wed, 29 Jun 2005, Andrew D. Fant wrote:

> Afternoon all,
> 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)

As others have pointed out, you can build a cluster on top of RHEL.
Whether you need technical support is another question entirely.

You already have a cluster. Ask yourself this;  of the problems you have
had, how many would have been resolved more quickly with paid-for
technical support? I'd guess the answer is not many.

In our experience at least, the most common failures are due to duff
hardware, which generally are pretty simple to spot and sort out.

Our next most common failures are due to application problems,
ususally the queuing system mis-configuration or bugs, or buggy user code.
These aren't part of the OS, and so you can expect no help what so-ever
from your OS vendor.

We don't have support from the OS vendor (we happen to use debian, but use
whatever you are the most comfortable with) but we do have paid support
for our queuing system (LSF). If LSF breaks then everyone is dead in the
water, and it makes sense for us to mitigate that risk with paid support.


Cheers,

Guy

 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
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-- 
Dr. Guy Coates,  Informatics System Group
The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, Hinxton, Cambridge, CB10 1HH, UK
Tel: +44 (0)1223 834244 x 6925
Fax: +44 (0)1223 494919