We installed all flavors of RHEL 3.0 from the same base media. Red Hat uses "Personality Technology" to customize the installation to WS, ES or AS--only the installation-boot CD differs. The company says this technology will let it create custom distributions of RHEL for large desktop rollouts or government organizations. All versions are supported by Red Hat technical support at various levels; the distribution also supports major independent software vendor applications, such as Oracle and IBM WebSphere, and includes desktop applications like Mozilla and OpenOffice, along with must-haves like Apache, Samba and NFS.
After installing all three versions, we examined the management functions of RHN (Red Hat Network) satellite and proxy servers. Installation was straightforward and easy to follow on the RHEL x86-supported hardware. All our test-bed devices, including network and sound cards, were installed and configured automatically. Previous users of Red Hat Linux or RHEL will feel right at home with the installer, which is based on Red Hat's venerable Anaconda installer interface.
The WS version is best-suited for desktop clients because it supports hardware with a maximum of two processors. However, the operating system will run on 32-bit architecture/x86 hardware, as well as 64-bit hardware, including Intel Itanium and AMD 64. WS is the least expensive variety, starting at $179 per copy without support, but it includes one year's worth of the RHN update module. Technical support, limited to 12/5, is available starting at $299 per workstation.
Unfortunately, Red Hat premium support, 24/7, is only available for the AS version. Although Red Hat aims this release at the desktop/client market or as part of a technical computing farm, the WS version could function as low-budget Web or file servers because it includes Apache and Samba and supports more than 8 GB of memory.
The ES version, targeted to edge network services like DNS, DHCP, Web, and file and print, runs only on x86 32-bit architectures with memory footprints smaller than 8 GB. Unlike WS, this version let us install Red Hat-supported packages, including DNS, DHCP, FTP and LDAP servers, and firewall services.
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