Does anyone know of any manufacturer that lists CentOS as an officially suported OS? Fujitsu and Dell don't support it. I'm specifically looking for CentOS support; vendors that only support RHEL are not sufficient for my needs.
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I don't know of any directly, you might have to contact CentOS to find out. But what are you looking for by supported? That their hardware works properly, or that they'll troubleshoot your hardware with a support contract if you have it installed?
If you just want compatibility, anything that "officially" supports Red Hat should run CentOS, since CentOS is Red Hat's code.
In my experience most vendors have trouble supporting anything that isn't Windows, whether they say they support it or not (just adds layers of headache in the process and we end up doing the legwork ourselves). Ninety percent of the time when there's a problem (we use Dell) it's a call to them due to hardware, and for that they want you to run onboard diagnostics regardless of operating system. It's usually not hard to convince them of the necessary new parts to be shipped once you run their diagnostic CD or controller diagnostics, and we don't normally have to call the manufacturer because of misconfigured software, since fully supported doesn't apply to software beyond the OS anyway.
womble
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Bart Silverstrim
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1+1 Dell mostly ask you to run the onboard diagnostics if there's a problem, especially after you've told them you can't boot into Windows. – WheresAlice Apr 26 '10 at 10:16
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I just dont wont to hear "Sorry we cannot replace your broken hard disk because you are running an OS which is not supported and this violates your warranty" – Iraklis Apr 26 '10 at 10:17
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@Iraklis anyone who says that isn't worth dealing with in the first place. – Tom O'Connor Apr 26 '10 at 10:24
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So what you are saying is that with dell for example running CentOs won't violate the warranty? – Iraklis Apr 26 '10 at 10:30
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2You have to differentiate between warranty and support contracts. (Hardware) warranty is about "When your disk fails, we'll replace it". This is independent of the OS used. Support contract on the other hand are about "We guarantee you that XYZ will run on our hardware, and if not we will help get it running". What is offered in that direction varies wildly, and is often restricted to a small group of products and recommended setups (i.e. most hardware vendors will support RHEL and/or SLES at best, but no Debian or FreeBSD). – Sven Apr 26 '10 at 10:54
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We've never had a problem with Dell saying they won't replace something due to the software we have installed. We just have to prove to them that there's reasonable chance that the issue with with their hardware and they send the replacement part(s). They primarily want you to run onboard diags to prove it. If you're not running Windows, you have to fall back on their built-in BIOS diagnostics or the beep codes/LCD panel errors. If you have a support contract for a specific configuration, that's different. Broken drive is a broken drive regardless of OS installed. – Bart Silverstrim Apr 26 '10 at 11:29
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Besides that, if you're a business, Dell would rather not have you badmouthing them for service, and it's far cheaper to send you parts than have you complaining to other businesses about their products and services. – Bart Silverstrim Apr 26 '10 at 11:31
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Dell techs sometimes make me furious with their server HD replacement policy. Sometimes they want to run all these diagnostics when a drive drops out of the array, taking an hour of both our times. In the end, they just end up sending me a refurbished drive anyways. I imagine what I and the tech cost per hour doesn't add up to the cost of the bleeping refurbished drive. If it was up to me I would cancel all our 4 hour contracts and just by some cold spares. – Kyle Brandt Apr 26 '10 at 12:04
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I've never had a problem with them replacing clearly bad hardware however I have had them balk at replacing hardware when the only error is that the system crashes. – Jim B Apr 26 '10 at 12:04
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Oh, but for your question of Running CentOS on Dell, I always just tell them it is Red Hat :-) – Kyle Brandt Apr 26 '10 at 12:06
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1For the record, Dell's Linux support is pretty good. I always try to get that department on the enterprise support part. – Matt Simmons Apr 26 '10 at 13:46
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Sometimes you get segmented departments that if you veer off the script they're clueless, so you have to either insist on transferring to someone else who does know what's going on or if you're certain of the part that is bad just...um...improvise your message, if you know what I mean. But again, %90 of the time, they'll want hardware diagnostics anyway, nothing to do with the operating system. – Bart Silverstrim Apr 26 '10 at 14:01
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I know you don't want it, but Red Hat is a pretty good guideline.
As far as support incidents go, Dell isn't too bad with their PowerEdge servers when it comes to Linux, they recognize that this is what people want to run. Red Hat is pretty well supported. For diagnostics/troubleshooting, it is a good idea to install the OMSA (Open Manage Server Assist) piece into your system so that you can look at the hardware states.
In my experience with Dell, 90% of the time when I have a bad disk, I just make the warranty call and say "My ESC is foo, I have a bad disk" and they just send me a new one, no questions asked. 90% of the rest of the time I can say "Well I have two systems that are the same and I've swapped drives, and the second system agrees that the disk is bad" and they send me the new disk. Once I had some guy drill me around with re-seating and looking in the OMSA (he was surprised I already had it installed) and firmwares and controller cabling, but eventually he too just sent me the disk.
David Mackintosh
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If your OS isn't supported, Dell will simply ask you to download and boot a diagnostic liveCD (which in my days used to be based on CentOS4). That should be enough to put the OS being at fault out of the picture.
dyasny
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