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 NX-OS
Score 9.9 out of 10
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Cisco NX-OS is a network operating system presented as a solution to help network operations move at the speed of business, with comprehensive automation, extensive visibility, and flexible open architectures for data center networks. NX-OS is the network operating system for all fabric architectures, from traditional L2/L3 to overlay-based fabrics.Cisco NX-OS powers the modern data center.
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.
This easy solution can be a great help for the big companies on easy multiple data processing and effective networking solutions for the various departments and also generating the real-time data reports with Cisco NX-OS is excellent. For the new users, it takes no time to become a pro on full manipulation of the features and offer the best and quality management services.
I think one feature it does really well is the virtual port channel feature. We have a lot of switches around the place that don't necessarily do port channeling really well. The Nexus platform comes in using the VPC feature, we're able to have multiple servers and then user devices connected, which gives us a lot better resiliency and scalability. Availability, it's easy to use, easy to maintain. Downtime is almost minimal. I think without a particular feature we would be stuck, so it's very good.
I think one thing we'd like to see a bit more in the Nexus space is probably the troubleshooting features. So one would be the I perf feature and being able to test network traffic across links. Don't get me wrong, there's a lot of really good features in terms of troubleshooting, but one particular one that we like to see is where we can test network traffic. We can make sure that we have good latency, we got good bandwidth utilization as well. For us that's a big one. We've got to use third party tools to do that. So if the NXOS platform can do it, that's one of the thing we've got to do.
NX-OS has many similarities with the traditional IOS which is quite beneficial when it comes to configuration and learning. As a native Linux system, there are a lot of tools and features that can be enabled for any use case.
Our switches running NX-OS have provided solid consistent throughput. We haven't had any issues with it not being able to handle what we threw at it. The latency is extremely low. It also has multiple management options that we hope to pursue in the future.
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.
Cisco support never fails me. In terms of timely response, no one is on par with them. They really value the impact of having technical issues and potential business stoppage. Also, their support staff are well equipped with knowledge and skills and easily resolve the most common incidents. Most of the time, we can resolve an issue by just calling them once.
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.
I am much more familiar with the commands in Cisco IOS as it has been around for many more years. I know why NX-OS is a different system and can see the benefits of the fibre channel integration, but I do not understand why the commands had to use a different syntax. With the Nexus switches you don't get a choice of operating system unfortunately.
Up to now, we haven't had a major ground-shaking attack on our networks but we take no chances by using NX-OS alongside a SIEM. All endpoints and workloads are secure so I would say we have plenty of trust in their security model.
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.
