RHEL Dev subscription now free

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TuxDude

Well-Known Member
Sep 17, 2011
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After trying to call RedHat for support once a couple years ago and then being told that our paid subscription didn't include support (a side effect of the academic subscription we were on), we ended up just saving the cash and moving to CentOS for everything including production. For the rare few times that we need a support number there are a lot of 3rd party companies happy to do per-incident coverage of CentOS - or we can still always setup a matching RHEL instance to reproduce a problem in if we want RedHat to look at it by just keeping a couple of RHEL entitlements active, no more need to entitle at scale though.
 

gigatexal

I'm here to learn
Nov 25, 2012
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607
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Portland, Oregon
alexandarnarayan.com
After trying to call RedHat for support once a couple years ago and then being told that our paid subscription didn't include support (a side effect of the academic subscription we were on), we ended up just saving the cash and moving to CentOS for everything including production. For the rare few times that we need a support number there are a lot of 3rd party companies happy to do per-incident coverage of CentOS - or we can still always setup a matching RHEL instance to reproduce a problem in if we want RedHat to look at it by just keeping a couple of RHEL entitlements active, no more need to entitle at scale though.
I'm not an MBA student or anything nor claim to be a business tycoon but it would seem to me that at some ratio providing support for even academic subscribers would help steer those students now in the workforce to use RedHat over say CentOS. It's like MS is buying up companies to make Visual Studio more of a platform unto itself so that people use Azure more. Not sure if it will work but it makes sense. So by not providing you guys support and others in that same tier they're potential lucrative customers.
 

TuxDude

Well-Known Member
Sep 17, 2011
616
338
63
I'm not an MBA student or anything nor claim to be a business tycoon but it would seem to me that at some ratio providing support for even academic subscribers would help steer those students now in the workforce to use RedHat over say CentOS. It's like MS is buying up companies to make Visual Studio more of a platform unto itself so that people use Azure more. Not sure if it will work but it makes sense. So by not providing you guys support and others in that same tier they're potential lucrative customers.
It was due to bad communication on exactly what the different academic subscriptions offer. We were using the entitlements for production servers on the administrative side of the school (not students in labs), but had entitlements that were only supposed to be for student lab use and hence included full RHN access and self-serve access to support info but no real support calls.

And yes - MS does a VERY good job practically giving away their software to educational institutions (kindergarten through university), knowing that if the students all grow up on their platform they are likely to stay on it. Had we decided to purchase the proper academic RHEL entitlements we needed we would have been paying more than we do for a Windows Datacenter license (the student-only entitlements we had were almost as much as a DC-edition license). With the academic discounts MS gives out stuff pretty much has to be free to compete on price - of course things can compete on other terms, as we're still paying a decent amount for all our vSphere licensing because HyperV is imho still not quite there.
 

gigatexal

I'm here to learn
Nov 25, 2012
2,913
607
113
Portland, Oregon
alexandarnarayan.com
Ahh makes sense. Yeah, speaking of Hyper-V anyone know of a good monitoring tool. I am thinking something like HTOP but for my Hyper-V host and something that could peer into the VMs themselves and glean me out some data.