[ale] FW: SUSE Linux Days 2013 kicks off this May!

Wed May 15 16:43:38 EDT 2013

Hi All, 

I certainly didn't mean to suggest it was overpriced--just that it's way out of our price range. It's also clearly overkill for what we need. I guess I am interested in it more for the "learning how to make it all work" part than as a way to saving me time. We use Citrix XenServer (free) and it more than more than meets our needs for now, but I may still play with the OpenSUSE cloud stuff for the 60 day free period. I may also have a go at the raw OpenStack stuff. I'm not so scared of 782 config parameters assuming they have reasonable defaults. Then again, it may be a complete nightmare. 

So much interesting stuff to learn, and so little time! 

One of the main speakers said a few times, "Linux is free so long as your time is worth nothing." I thought that was a bit odd for someone from a major Linux vendor to say (especially more than once). Anyway, I see the point, but I don't think it's always true: sometimes the time you spend is more than made up for by the value of the knowledge gained, plus you have to compare it to the alternative. Windows and Mac (especially server) admin is not always so obvious and takes time to learn too. Windows seems to love changing which hidden dialog box you need to search out to make things work from version to version. I was also struck by how he on the one hand said how easy their solution was, and on the other highly suggested we pay for a two-week consulting kick-start program to teach us how to set it up and use it! Not that they both can't be true, but it was kinda funny to me. 

Scott 

----- Original Message -----

From: "Jay Lozier" <jslozier at gmail.com> 
To: "Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts" <ale at ale.org> 
Sent: Wednesday, May 15, 2013 10:05:44 AM 
Subject: Re: [ale] FW: SUSE Linux Days 2013 kicks off this May! 

Hi, 

I was there also. The part I was intrigued by was the virtualization/cloud 
technology. 

On Wed, 15 May 2013 09:49:19 -0400, Beddingfield, Allen <allen at ua.edu> 
wrote: 

> I was there, too :) 
> While the prices he put up on the slide may seem a bit high, compared 
> with the prices from VMware and others in the market, it is a bargain. 
> The one thing he glossed over that will bring the price up more is the 
> unlimited VM entitlement for SLES for each node. I'm looking at a 
> retail price list now, and for one two socket node, the prices are as 
> follows: 
> basic support: $1420 for 3 years 
> standard support: $3240 for 3 years 
> priority support: $5300 for 3 years. 
> If you have EDU pricing, you can probably cut all of that in half. 
> Also, talk with your SUSE rep and see if they can get it in the door at 
> a lower price for you. 
> Go and download/play with a copy of SUSE cloud. Given that their 
> easy-to-use repackaging of OpenStack is still a complex beast, I'm not 
> sure I would want to tackle a compile-from-source setup in production. 
> As a sanity check, just be sure that what you need can't be better 
> served by a traditional solution such as VMware VSPhere, Citrix 
> XenServer or KVM/Xen on Linux + shared storage. We are a university of 
> over 30,000 students, and we still don't have a cloud deployment 
> (shhh...don't tell the SUSE guys, I've already heard the sales pitch!). 
> We are using VMware VSphere primarily. Part of that is due to the fact 
> that we don't really want non-IT people haphazardly provisioning new 
> servers :) 
> Allen B. 
> 
> -- 
> Allen Beddingfield 
> Systems Engineer 
> The University of Alabama 
> ________________________________ 
> From: ale-bounces at ale.org [ale-bounces at ale.org] on behalf of Scott 
> Plante [splante at insightsys.com] 
> Sent: Tuesday, May 14, 2013 8:22 PM 
> To: Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts 
> Subject: Re: [ale] FW: SUSE Linux Days 2013 kicks off this May! 
> 
> I went to the SUSE Linux Day today and it was very interesting. The 
> major focus was around their suite of cloud technologies and it all 
> looked very nice. Of course, it has a price tag to go with it! I don't 
> have any problem with companies making money on their hard work, but I 
> can say that without major discounts, it's well, well out of my price 
> range. They do deal and it was list the were quoting, so possibly it 
> could still happen. It's all built on open source technologies, 
> including OpenStack. Their very nice tool for creating VMs, install CDs, 
> PXE images, etc., has a free limited hosted version: 
> http://susestudio.com/ . I actually used that a while back (1-2yr?) to 
> create a "VM Appliance" version of one of our products, but no one 
> seemed to be interested then in loading a pre-installed VM. I think our 
> typical users had no idea whether any VM technology was being used in 
> their organization, or who to ask about it, but that's another subject. 
> 
> A lot was made about how hard OpenStack is to do on your own--has anyone 
> on the list done raw OpenStack? What was your experience like? We tend 
> toward making the free, open source versions of things work for us. Then 
> again, maybe we'd make more money as a company if I didn't spend so much 
> time playing admin and concentrated on my paid programming work ;-). 
> 
> Thanks, Allen (and Jim Kinney), for the heads up on this seminar. 
> Besides the interesting technical stuff, the lunch was very nice and I 
> got to chat with some very nice and interesting folks :-D 
> 
> Scott 
> 
> ________________________________ 
> From: "Allen Beddingfield" <allen at ua.edu> 
> To: ale at ale.org 
> Sent: Friday, April 19, 2013 3:57:50 PM 
> Subject: [ale] FW: SUSE Linux Days 2013 kicks off this May! 
> 
> FYI, this is May 14th in Atlanta. It is free. If any of you are 
> interested in learning more about SUSE Linux Enterprise and the related 
> products, it would be a good event to attend. I plan to be there. They 
> usually serve a pretty good breakfast and lunch at these things, too :) 
> Allen B. 
> -- 
> Allen Beddingfield 
> Systems Engineer 
> The University of Alabama 
> 
> _______________________________________________ 
> Ale mailing list 
> Ale at ale.org 
> http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale 
> See JOBS, ANNOUNCE and SCHOOLS lists at 
> http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo 

-- 
Jay Lozier 
jslozier at gmail.com 
_______________________________________________ 
Ale mailing list 
Ale at ale.org 
http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale 
See JOBS, ANNOUNCE and SCHOOLS lists at 
http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.ale.org/pipermail/ale/attachments/20130515/bc09c089/attachment.html>