PARSEC Technical Information

This page is dedicated to providing migration information for folks who have decided to move away from Red Hat and over to another Linux distribution. First of all, you might want to know that this is a common sentiment mainly due to choices made by Red Hat themselves.

I will use the terminology RHEL and OEL a lot. Those are short for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Oracle Enterprise Linux.

These are the leading reasons why you might want to make a move away from Red Hat which have to do with Red Hat themselves.

1. Red Hat requires every install have a subscription no matter what it's used for (dev, test, UAT, doesn't matter)
2. Red Hat charges too much money for support. They will charge you $300 for a subscription to Red Hat and can't even call their support at that level. You just get “maybe we will respond if it's convenient” email support from their offshore teams. It's not worth $30 much less $300 and customers feel squeezed.
3. Many of the useful and interesting features such as clustering, glusterfs, and virtualization have been broken into separate and expensive layered products. This defeats some of the reason to run Linux in the first place, turning it into an expensive walled garden.
4. Red Hat's kernel patches require a reboot. Oracle Linux with ksplice doesn't have this issue (but it's a for profit feature in OEL, just FYI).
5. Red Hat began the move to Lennart Pottering's Systemd init replacement. For some, that move has been a painful disaster that has made administration more difficult and application management more problematic. For many, the move was unacceptable.
6. Some customers dislike Red Hat's update schedule, considering it to be overly frequent and aggressive.
7. Patches and even trivial packages aren't available unless your subscription is up to date. If not, you have a partially broken system.
8. Red Hat sales people tend to aggressively threaten and browbeat their customers rather than working with them on balancing entitlements.
9. Red Hat training is very dubious and scammy. They make up tests with “gotcha” questions that you'll only learn if you take their $2500 - $3000 dollar classes, but those factoids are only to keep knowledgeable sysadmins from passing their $250 test without paying the trollbridge fee for the classes.
10. Red Hat has been bought by IBM who has begun the process of strip mining the company and moving everything they can offshore. Quality is dropping.
11. Red Hat has a history of making poor technical choices. Example: they eschewed XFS and badmouthed it for years refusing to support it, then started using it as the default in RHEL7 enigmatically. Now they cheerlead for it.
12. RHEL follows Fedora and bad decisions in Fedora (of which therea are MANY) filter into RHEL eventually. The history of this happening in the past has definitely put some customers off and made them gunshy about upgrades.
13. Red Hat isn't excited about BTRFS because the main developer works at Oracle. This could lead to more stagnation with Red Hat's already stagnant choices for filesystems. It's missing inline compression and deduplication without either BTRFS, ZFS-on-Linux, or ReiserFS v4.x.

These are the reasons folks usually migrate when they are facing internal struggles.

1. It becomes too expensive to keep dev/test/UAT/training machines licensed with a subscription.
2. The sysadmin gets tired of being cut off from OS packages and patches every time entitlements expire.
3. Sysadmin frustration with the licensing portal or “Red Hat Satellite” package caches which are simply there for to prevent Red Hat being able to cut you off from your package repository any time they please. They still don't prevent Red Hat cutting you off from updates.
4. The management gets tired of some of Red Hat's rude salespeople or their aggressive tactics & threats.
5. The customer needs clustering, ksplice, storage or OS virtualization, containerization or other features Red Hat can't provide, does poorly, or overcharges for.

The main way to decide on a migration target is to consider the reason why you want to ditch Red Hat. If you plan to keep Red Hat's tools and structure but you are just tired of paying so much, then CentOS and Oracle Enterprise Linux (OEL) would both solve your problems.

If you are completely tired of Red Hat (and as an RHCE I totally understand) and want to run away screaming to another Linux distribution that offers your more for less and doesn't follow Fedora like a lemming, then I'd suggest trying a Debian or Devuan based Linux distribution. These are more significantly different from Red Hat's ways of doing things. Folks just sick of Red Hat's methods and mentality can jump ship to any number of distros and be happy. If you want to abandon Linux completely, then perhaps consider one of the BSD distributions such as FreeBSD.

Check out the features below which are the ones our customers cite the most as being in play when considering a Red Hat migration.

So, consider these scenarios:

1. You are tired of every system needing a subscription even to have basic package functionality. Solution: Just update to any other Linux distro (or BSD) from Red Hat except for SuSE Enterprise (which has some of the same problems).
2. You want a way to escape from Redhat without doing a huge dump-and-load migration on every box. Solution: Upgrade to Oracle Enterprise Linux. They have a tool that will convert Red Hat machines into OEL machines without having to completely wipe out the OS and start over. It's quite slick and it infuriates Red Hat.
3. You want better choices for advanced filesystems. Solution: Move to Debian, Devuan, Ubuntu Server, or FreeBSD and use either ZFS-on-Linux (or native ZFS in FreeBSD) or migrate to BTRFS when it stabilizes. Also, see if you might be able to get a specific feature by combining LVM2 features with other filesystems. For example, Reiser4 has compression support and LVM2 has thin provisioning and advanced caching.
4. You want to move to a distro with a stable upgrade path. Solution: Switch to FreeBSD if possible or use a less buggy distro like Oracle Enterprise Linux (though it still has some nasty landmines during upgrades we've seen, it's better than RHEL's terrible “backup everything and hope real hard.” upgrade procedure).

At this point, it's very difficult to recommend Red Hat's products. There are a few exceptions where they have little or no competition, but mostly those are layered application products. So, customers who migrate will get five big benefits.

1. Smaller costs and lower cost growth for non-production environments.
2. More stability and some insulation from Red Hat's historically poor decisions.
3. Direct and permanent open Internet access to your basic package repos without hassle-servers (Uh, I mean caching servers ala Satellite & Spacewalk).
4. More stable upgrade paths between major versions
5. Access to advanced storage technology Red Hat doesn't yet support.

Personally, I'd also include “the satisfaction of telling your ultra-rude & aggressive salesperson that you no longer even run Redhat and please stop calling and threatening to audit or otherwise hassle you.” In my personal case, I had around 600 RHEL machines convert to Oracle Enterprise Linux and Red Hat's only response was to threaten to do a forced software audit. Since we'd completely migrated every machine, it would have been a very short audit (as in “Would you like a cup of coffee before you go?”, but they never actually did it (probably because they knew they had no leg to stand on).