CentOS Linux vs. SUSE Linux Enterprise Server

I have been a CentOS user for over 10 years and remain loyal to the core OS. When it comes to stability and speed, there's no other OS I'd recommend over it. I base this recommendation on my personal experience, as I have multiple development and production servers running the CentOS software today. It's running on newer and older hardware with ease, and the price is right!

Incentivized

SLES is a good fit for running supported enterprise applications like SAP, HANA, oracle,.. We use it to run all our SAP workloads, and so far everything has worked great. All libraries are right in the repository, all documentation is correct and the support answers really fast in case you have problems.

Incentivized

• First of all, CentOS is one of the most secure and stable OSes straits from the box.
• High performance on the average hardware.
• In most of my scenarios—easy and quick deployment.
• Huge KB community that helps to build and support different services on CentOS.
• Versions lifecycle.

Incentivized

• Seems Custom made for SAP workloads
• Longest standing collaboration between platform and apps
• SuSE for SAP works seamless on-prem, on SAP Cloud, Azure, AWS & GCP
• Support for oldest SP of SuSE so our customers can run their business without fear

• It's not as intuitive as it could be
• Some packages can be quite old compared with other distributions
• Breaking changes appear often when packages are obsoleted usually with no supported transition path (this is a general *NIX problem, but it's more accentuated in CentOS)

Incentivized

• The support window for service packs after a new SP is released is too short.
• Community engagement is low.
• There are times when supported packages fall too far behind and create compatibility issues with applications. The Open Build Service usually provides a way around this, though.

Incentivized

For the breadth of services, features and overall performance, I believe Suse Linux is a great choice for any enterprise. It still has to grow a bit in areas like online help forums and documents, but we are pretty much satisfied with our choice.

Incentivized

Again, written documentation is excellent, even on the older versions. The support community is the best. It is comprehensive and I would say that it global because it transcends national boundaries. Also, you find all types of people using CentOS to do all sorts of things so you are bound to find someone to talk to if there are problems.

Incentivized

It's great for basic support issues. But it's less suited for anything that is either obscure or uncommon, and it is very hard to escalate, unless you've built a relationship with your vendor/salesperson.

Incentivized

Third party training was fast but mostly unnecessary as we were already Unix trained and Linux familiar

Ubuntu Linux is another candidate that we've evaluated. It stacks up well against CentOS Linux, however it does have some quirks we need to deal with such as package management and stability. For the most part, the server version of Ubuntu is stable, but we stick with CentOS Linux because it seems to have a slight edge over Ubuntu in that realm as well. I have colleagues at other firms that are wholesale Ubuntu server infrastructure, and they are very happy with it and Ubuntu is favorable there. With the changes that have occurred or may still yet occur at CentOS Linux, we may go down the path towards Ubuntu. But for now, CentOS Linux is where we are parked and will remain for the foreseeable future.

Incentivized

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server works well with the SUSE Manager, it really simplifies everything. We also do have SUSE 4 SAP, and the SUSE Manager is able to manage them all, even other (up to date) Linux distributions. Patching has never been that easy and the SALT integration is also working without any problems.

We have successfully deployed on physical servers, VMs and in cloud all over the globe from templates of our own design

• Since CentOS is free, our developers and engineers can use it without regard for dipping into project budgets.
• We can spin up a CentOS VM, use it and then destroy it without having to worry about licensing headaches.
• CentOS can run on just about any hardware platform: server, laptop, old hardware, etc. so that makes it less expensive in that we don't have to buy specialized hardware for it.

Incentivized

• It allows a very small team to manage a large number of servers, due to its automation and manageability.
• SAP supports it very well, making it straightforward to manage. There are also "recipes" for Oracle which has all of the requisites to install an Oracle DB; which helps with deployment immensely.
• It lets us run large SAP instances in SLES on Power, helping us with support, manageability, and performance.
• Support costs are high, but required for SLES for SAP.

Incentivized