CentOS Linux is a Linux distribution is an enterprise OS platform compatible with its source RedHat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). Its end of life was announced for December 2021.
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Cisco IOS
Score 9.7 out of 10
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Cisco IOS, presently in its 15th edition, is a network operating system for service providers and enterprises alike.
In any role where you need raw server power, CentOS Linux is extremely well suited. It is extremely stable, and in my experience, probably the most stable of the Linux distros available. It has a very wide base of support from 3rd party sources for additional functionality that do not come already in the CentOS Linux distribution itself. It is not as appropriate for situations that are customer facing or end user facing. For those, I recommend Ubuntu Linux. But for everything server & compute related, I recommend CentOS Linux.
Well suited for building management networks across the organization as it has been reliable without much downtime. Since it has great switching qualities, it suites well for data center and end-user connectivity using access switches. It might not be the best for routing, as other XOR software has proven to be superior for routing.
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.
CentOS is based on RHEL, so it really came down to the costs when making the selection between our options. RHEL offered more support and features, but nothing that we specifically needed. CentOS is fully customizable, something Windows Server was also lacking in many ways. The stability and speed was unmatched in comparison to Windows, and we were not utilizing any Windows-specific software to require us to use the Microsoft alternative. My years of experience have also made it a breeze to set up and configure new CentOS instances, leading me to stay where I'm comfortable.
We have found other Cisco software to be filled with added functionalities as compared to iOS. New NCS software has certain programmability features that are advantageous to legacy iOS software but are more complex to use for some users. Hence, we still have most areas of the network that functions using iOS software.
CentOS's support of RPM packages makes it very easy to replicate RHEL servers for development or testing in cheap / free environments
CentOS's minimalistic desktop environment requires additional tweaking / packages if you want to have a usable desktop environment with the niceties of other modern distributions. As a result, if developers want to use CentOS, they'll need to spend more time customizing it than other distros.
CentOS's easy customization from the command line lends itself well to our virtualization infrastructure where setup can be easily scripted to modify CentOS's configuration files.
