Server Performance Comparison

[Matt Graham]

On 2015-01-24 21:58, James Dugger wrote:
> I have seen it take days of extra time for a RHEL based web server
> environment to get provisioned ore re-provisioned, tested, and
> implemented, when there was a pre-built provisioned instance of
> Ubuntu that could have been tweaked tested and implemented in hours.

This sounds like a failure of sysadminning.  It's fairly easy to 
generate a kickstart (automated installation) file for RHEL/CentOS, 
which can install all the ordinary packages from the standard 
RHEL/CentOS repos.  The kickstart file can also run an arbitrary shell 
script after all the packages are installed, which'd get additional 
repos and the packages in them and so forth.  I did this for the last 
round of physical server installs; we could get a physical machine from 
"has no OS" to "running all the stuff" fairly quickly.

Or was this more like "we didn't think about anything but Ubuntu until 
the last minute"?

> Why would you want a GUI on your server anyway?

Some things that can be useful (imagemagick, for one) can have 
dependencies on X11 libraries.  Some things like LibreOffice require a 
running X server but can also be used to do things like convert PDFs to 
MSWord in an automated fashion.  (The guy I was talking to who needed to 
do that used Xvfb to fake an X server....)

> Corporate IT based provisioned or pre-provisioned snapshots are the
> standard.

...and if you want to do something that they haven't thought of, then 
the Dire Slug Of Bureaucracy rears its shambling face-analogue and eats 
all your free time...

> In other words the cost in human capital to provision a
> web server becomes the decision factor

Did you mean "human labor"?  Installing junk on a server feels a lot 
more like labor than capital to me if you go by economic terms.  
(Buzzwords don't tend to respect things like dictionaries or previous 
word usages though.)

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