Is Ubuntu Server ready for enterprise class computing? Part 1
I know that a great percentage of you may feel otherwise but coming from a data storage background, I must say, I was a bit disappointed with Canonical’s Ubuntu Server 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex). Please do not misundertand me, I praise Canonical for all that they had accomplished. While my distro of choice may not be Ubuntu, my wife uses it with no troubles at all. As a desktop client, it is one of many excellent choices.
Now this post may be a little biased and I do apologize for that in advance. I am trying my best to let it not be. As I had just mentioned, Ubuntu is not my distro of choice, but instead I prefer and use Red Hat/Fedora for my server and personal computing needs. It all goes back to 2002 when I first picked up Red Hat 7.3 and stuck with it since. I had tried to use other distros, such as SUSE, Debian, etc. but always fell back to Red Hat. With that in mind, I have had a significant exposure to Red Hat products. I have also grown extremely comfortable with the Red Hat environment.
Coming back to the topic of GNU/Linux and data storage, it needs to be noted that most enterprise class storage suppliers/vendors focus their efforts to RHEL and SLES. Even without the support of these suppliers and vendors, out-of-box both RHEL and SLES are well equipped to be able to recognize and manage your external storage. No additional work necessary. Unfortunately, I cannot say the same about my experience with Ubuntu Server 8.10. On the enterprise computing level Red Hat and Novell had time to mature their operating platform, but is it still too soon for Canonical?
Last weekend, I installed the server edition of Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex (8.10) on a dummy node for testing with a QLogic Fibre Channel Host Bus Adapter (HBA) installed and it did not have the appropriate driver for it. The core driver for the Qlogic family of HBAs, qla2xxx, was installed but when I went to insert the device specific qla2340 stacked module, it did not exist. I must admit that while in GNU/Linux, for years I have been working from source, in the past couple of years and right after a fresh installation, that is the last thing I want to do. I work from source everyday and if there is an opportunity where I do not have to, I will take it. Sometimes I just want things to work out of the box. That is what I got accustomed to with RHEL and SLES.
I initially went to Canonical’s Launchpad to search for any known bugs or problems with working on Qlogic HBAs. Unfortunately I did not see anything too specific with the Intrepid release but there are a significant amount of known issues for previous releases: here and here
After reviewing some of the notes, it became apparent that the local administrator needed to build the driver from source in order to get it fully functional. There are a lot of things wrong with that scenario. During a kernel upgrade, am I risking breaking the driver and have to rebuild it? This can be somewhat excessive. Also, if I am working from a fresh install and the storage that I am installing to is outside of a Qlogic HBA, the installer will most likely not be able to locate the devices. Even running in diagnostics mode from the CD image may not be able to locate the disk devices. Now, with regards to building it from source, I was unable to find what I needed in aptitude/Synaptic, through the Canonical repositories. Also, when you go to Qlogic’s website, they only have device drivers written for RHEL and SLES. I have been doing device driver development for years now and sure it would not be difficult to make a few changes in those Qlogic packages, but again, I have reached a certain point where I do not feel like it. I just want it to work.
Before I abandon this OS, I will continue to dabble around with it some more and see if I am overlooking anything. I will be sure to keep all updates posted to this blog, for all those interested. But I have to ask the question: Is Ubuntu Server ready for enterprise class computing?
Check out Part 2.
