What are the benifits of Enterprise Linux?

Server Config
1

Hi All

I am needing to understand the reasons why one would use Enterprise Linux over free linux? Why would you use Suse Enterprise rather than openSuse or Ubuntu?

Thanks for any comments. This is not meant to bash the commercial copies of linux, i genuinely need to understand as a clients software company wants them to spend £2000 on linux when I have installed it for free for them. I can’t explain to them why.

Thanks

2

The ability to buy Support.

That’s pretty much it. Large companies (Enterprises) don’t mind paying a company $15,000 for some dude to come in and fix something when something goes wrong.

(I made up that fee, but they are usually extremely high)

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So it is exactly the same software but they will provide engineers?

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Yes. There are sometimes a few other subtle differences, such as SELinux being enabled by default, certain IP Tables being on by default, etc. But for the most part, the company is paying for support for X number of months. If something goes wrong, they are covered (someone will fix it for them, relatively quickly – depends on the contract).

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Probably not exactly the same software, there could be lots of little things that are different. But the ability to pay them for extra support is the major difference. You can generally also be certified in Enterprise versions.

If you’re interested in the differences, most of the time you can probably find those fairly easily. It helps with their marketting.

The wiki for SUSE explains it pretty well:

####OpenSUSE vs SUSE Linux Enterprise
OpenSUSE is a freely available, community project that releases versions comparatively, on a frequent basis and generally, uses the latest versions of the various open source projects that it includes.

SUSE Linux Enterprise is SUSE’s commercial edition, which SUSE releases much less frequently, enabling it to offer support more effectively for enterprise and production deployments. It is certified for a wide variety of enterprise applications and offers a number of special enterprise features including, High Availability and Point of Sale extensions. SUSE historically uses a heavily-tested subset of packages from OpenSUSE Linux as the basis for SUSE Linux Enterprise.

Link

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Thanks all that helps a great deal

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