Potential Opportunity to Validate LVS for use with Seibel CRM

[Roberto Nibali]

Hello Dave,

> I don't mean to be vague on this topic. I have never been involved with
> attempting to get support from a commercial software company and that
> what this basically is. 

So how shall we proceed in that matter? I, for one, have been involved 
in such efforts of software standardising and that's why I've asked the 
questions earlier in this thread. I cannot speak for the project but to 
me it sounds interesting to have professional support for configuration 
items within LVS as a third party software.

> My emails have been rather scattershot. I guess they have been
> multipurpose:
> 
> 1- to inform the developers of LVS of what is happening in *my* world in
> regards to LVS
> 2- to inform other users of what is happening in *my* world with LVS
> 3- to query the other listers about any information on their experiences
> on obtaining support from commercial vendors on *supported software
> configurations*

This is a complex process and involves most of the commercial vendors' 
business regarding software distribution and marketing. The questions on 
multi-level support and possible SLA agreements between said commercial 
vendor and its customers raise. It might be a good idea to get the 
*supported software configurations* part via a partner programme, for 
example RedHat or Suse. It's a liability thing and they have more 
experience in dealing with Open Source software "design contracts".

> 4- to try to *help* open source software by obtaining
> certification/validation from a leading CRM package

I still do not understand this part. What kind of certification? What is 
to be validated? A certain software configuration? This for one cannot 
be certified nor applied to any validation, to my avail. You need a 
complete inertial system comprised of an operating system, software 
packages, kernel version and hardware item configuration. This is how 
for example SAP/Business One does it with Suse. It's certified exactly 
to the extend of the n-tuple mentioned above. If you change one byte, 
you lose first-level support and are liable for damage and dysfunctional 
behaviour. So if someone goes ahead and sells CRM packages with LVS 
certification based on the premise that he's also transferring the 
liability to his customers by signing a partner channel contract with 
Siebel, and changes for example the GUI part of the LVS configuration to 
match his CI/CD which leads to LVS breakage, warranty is void and the 
certification per se has lost quality.

> 5- to query the other listers and determine if anyone else is using LVS
> as a load balancer for Seibel Application Servers or Seibel Web Servers.

I for one would be interested in understanding how exactly the Siebel 
CRM technology is built. How the load balancing is needed and 
implemented in the current version.

> 6- to see if any listers have any information about F5 Networks Big IP
> and how it compares with LVS.

It's very difficult to compare. LVS is mostly L3 technology, F5 however, 
ships application switches that have much more features (and some 
missing) regarding application and content management. F5 has (albeit a 
bit outdated most of the time) use case based documentation for their 
products.

> So there ya go!

Thanks for your patience and perseverance,
Roberto Nibali, ratz
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