cluster with different OS

[MuhammadGamal]

My customer wants to add additional nodes(RedHat) with different operating systems to the primary one(ubuntu). What is the best practice recommendation for this? 

[mrc15816]

@MuhammadGamal not sure reasons behind to have two different flavors of OS in the same environment. For several reasons you wouldn't want to mix simple being too many variables to watch out for from patching to supportability. We were looking at migrating from a lower version of Red Hat to higher and were told we could have for brief amount of time but not long term. Wish you the best!

[Romanenkov_Al3x]

Hello.

It's ideal when all nodes are the same - that's the best option. To answer the question - I had clusters with different operating systems  - the performance was fine.

We just need to keep in mind that the performance of the cluster. (just is a simple example - it's much more complex under the hood: node performance * number of nodes) will be determined by the weakest node (similar to how races are timed by the last runner) - and this metric can vary across different operating systems.

As a result, instead of 100*9=900, if we have one weak node with 80 (-20%), we will get (80*9)

720 != 880

A such (in terms of operating systems) cluster should only exist temporarily during a migration, but from practical experience (the migration in my case it was freeze for six+ months or more) the cluster was functioning almost perfectly (the switch was from RHEL to an old Debian with old libs)

===

I also recommend reaching out to support; the product is changing significantly and many new features are being added. They are always ready to help, and you will receive an official response.

Regards,

Alex Romanenkov