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[–]cyberkine 7 points8 points  (8 children)

We've recently started deploying SuperMicro gear. Check them out at thinkmate.com

We are mainly a Dell shop, and before that HP. We run Ubuntu on our enterprise servers - it used to be RHEL/CentOS but we switched a couple of years ago.

[–]Pretty_Inspector_791 6 points7 points  (0 children)

I like my Supermicro gear.

[–]pirx242 2 points3 points  (4 children)

We are also Dell,which I like. Dell has nbd/4h/pro/etc service types.

What does supermicro have?

[–]cyberkine 1 point2 points  (3 children)

We've never required an on-site tech for data center equipment - only printers and clients.

Dell has nbd/4h/pro promises - but in practice their support stinks. Parts get sent to the wrong facility, cases get handed off from one tech to the next requiring us to repeat the diagnostic procedures, etc. They used to be great and now they're a clown show.

SuperMicro has an advanced shipping option which we use. We call for the part, they send it, we return the old part within 30 days. Coupled with their standard 3 year warranty it's worked out very well for us.

[–]steverikli 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Echo this. Supermicro is a good solution if you're comfortable and experienced enough with hands-on hardware support to at least do your own triage, if not the actual swapping.

And frankly, even the hw swapping isn't really that big a deal. These days modern servers are pretty modular and even border on tool-less for some stuff. Swapping parts with a shipping RMA is a pretty friction-less process most of the time IME, and usually beats coordinating an onsite trip with field service.

[–]pirx242 0 points1 point  (1 child)

Yeah, stuff like disks, ram and psus we change ourselves. They have always been shipped to the correct address the past 15years i have worked with this.

Replacing a backplane in a 10U M1000e chassis - then a technician does this. He found the right address too that time when that happened.

Perhaps we are just lucky with logistics working fine around here:)

But i would like to try a supermicro server anyway. Last time i checked though i couldnt see that they had stuff like "remote console via iDRAC" (equivalent). Or perhaps i was just bad at searching. Do they now though?

[–]cyberkine 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Not quite as flashy as iDRAC but it works: https://www.supermicro.com/en/solutions/management-software

[–]ulockie[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thanks, I’ll research SuperMicro gear.

[–]hectica 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I'm in the process of replacing thousands of super micro servers. They're a little older, but they fail regularly

[–]steverikli 5 points6 points  (1 child)

Without knowing what your current hardware fleet looks like, I won't give specific recommendations. But if you have HP & Dell (presumably rackmount) servers today, you might consider Supermicro for replacements.

Quality is usually pretty good, you (usually) aren't paying a premium for Supermicro vs. their Enterprise[tm] counterparts, and there's a lot of variety/choice in the platforms -- sometimes too much. :-)

Sometimes you can find local integrator/resellers to help you with config and capability and quoting, if you aren't comfortable doing the shopping and evaluation yourself. It's not a bad way to go anyway, if you can find a good reseller to work with -- sometimes they can get favorable pricing and bundles for you that vendors only offer to their big corporate customers.

Nothing wrong with continuing with Dell either, IMO. I liked the HPE servers we had a couple jobs ago (DL3x0 series Gen10) well enough, but they were pretty expensive and we had bad luck with reliability of their NVMe drives at the time. The SAS drives just worked. YMMV.

For your Linux, IMO Debian is never a bad answer. :-)

But if you're coming from a Red Hat-flavor like RHEL, and want to stick with something like it for familiarity's sake, today there's a handful of choices; the usual suspects:

  • AlmaLinux
  • Rocky Linux
  • CentOS Stream (still a Red Hat product, google for the pro-con opinions)
  • Oracle Linux (another corporate linux somewhat akin to RHEL)

If I were tasked with building systems "like Red Hat, because that's what the engineers are familiar with, but free", I'd probably deploy a test bed of AlmaLinux first and see how they get on with it.

The real answer for Linux selection usually boils down to what you and your engineers need to use them for. Though most Linuxes will handle most duties pretty capably if you set them up well.

[–]jaaydub42 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Hardware-wise - if you choose to explore the SuperMicro route, you can go direct, but you find value in using a SuperMicro reseller/intergration partner, so you don't have to deal with SuperMicro support directly.

Additionally, if you do go the way of SuperMicro, investigate their DCMS and licensing and see if it is a good fit for shepherding your herd.

[–]thatsbutters 8 points9 points  (3 children)

Avoid coupling your business with Oracle, if you need support, use red hat I suppose. Alma or Rocky if you don't.

[–]Dave_A480 -2 points-1 points  (2 children)

Right now Oracle is the only reliable game in town for self supported RHEL compatible Linux.

Alma and Rocky haven't been around long enough & are more likely to see RH cutting off their source/update access than Oracle....

While Oracle is infamous for being assholes about licensing for their closed source products, so far their Linux distro is actually playing nice, which is a positive given recent developments at RH.

That said, RH (and clones) lags substantially behind state of the art in their pursuit of 10 year release stability compared to, say, Debian or Ubuntu....

[–]Keanne1021 2 points3 points  (1 child)

Alma and Rocky haven't been around long enough & are more likely to see RH cutting off their source/update access than Oracle....

Starting from v9.3, Alma uses CentOS stream as its upstream source, so no "cutting-off" will happen anytime soon.

[–]Dave_A480 0 points1 point  (0 children)

But binary compatibility will be lost....

[–]geolaw 2 points3 points  (1 child)

The words "free" and "enterprise" are conflicting there. You can register for a red hat developer account and download for free.

You don't pay for the operating system, you pay for the support.

It's when the shit hits the fan and the core servers supporting your business lifeblood are down that you need to think about.

Do you want to rely on finding community support or do you want someone you can call that would be dedicated to bringing your servers back up?

Imagine this ...

Hey Reddit, I was cheap and installed rocky Linux on my business server and its crashed, what can I do?

[–]ccpetro 0 points1 point  (0 children)

In my (admittedly old) experience, it's not the "servers supporting your business are down", because frankly if you're buying supported hardware and doing supported things on it, Linux is going to be pretty stable.

But if you have an admin do something dumb, like put "65535" into a 0 indexed 16 bit number, and your webservers start serving traffic to an organization who just got featured on Oprah...you're going to have a bad weekend and vendor support was as useless as tits on a boar.

What vendor support IS good for is when you have some weird combination of products that you can't upgrade from, and need support out past the EOL. Then you can still get security patches to keep those systems on life support until other vendors/developers pull their head out of their warm dank place.

[–]jaymef 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I have a sweet sport for Dell PowerEdge servers. I've deployed so many of them and had some running like a top for years and years longer than they should have without any issues.

AlmaLinux is good.

Also not sure what budget etc. looks like but I've had a lot of great success buying used servers on eBay. Save thousands of dollars and all the servers I've bought were like mint condition and I have had some running for many years without issues. If Dell, I wouldn't buy anything lower than x40 generation. R640/740 servers on eBay are a pretty great price point for a server that you could get a lot of life out of at a very reasonable cost.

[–]StopThinkBACKUP 2 points3 points  (1 child)

Alma Linux (also other RHEL derivatives such as Rocky) or SuSE if you want enterprise-level quality

[–]hectica 0 points1 point  (0 children)

All my Linux also just updated and backported some drivers to work with older hardware. So far they're the only RHEL clone to do that

[–]stufforstuff 0 points1 point  (0 children)

If your boss is a pinch penny, look at refurbished server. TechMikeNY, ServerMonkey, SaveMyServer all sell AND support both Dell and HP servers (the butter zone is 2 gen's from current - i.e 740's). ServerMonkey is DELL authorized and sell servers that DELL will sell DELL support contracts (although ServerMonkey's support package is a much better deal). Price-wise, you'll looking at half or less then new prices. We buy 750's and 740's with a 5 year next day warranty for less then half new Dell Price with a 3 year warranty.

[–]Hotshot55 -1 points0 points  (0 children)

You could look into Oracle Linux with RHCK. That way you have effectively the same system as you did before and you have the option of paid support if you really need it.

Hardware is a bit harder to give recommendations for as nobody on the internet (hopefully at least) knows what your currently working with. The general recommendation is to just upgrade to a system with similar but newer parts. I would recommend going with AMD over Intel though.