HCL Domino Ideas Portal
Welcome to the #dominoforever Product Ideas Forum! The place where you can submit product ideas and enhancement request. We encourage you to participate by voting on, commenting on, and creating new ideas. All new ideas will be evaluated by HCL Product Management & Engineering teams, and the next steps will be communicated. While not all submitted ideas will be executed upon, community feedback will play a key role in influencing which ideas are and when they will be implemented.
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Adding to what Daniel indicated, RHEL is not going anywhere. So, to help with your confidence, Red Hat has an excellent kernel and is the industry leader and is cheaper than Windows--from my experience only (not citing some remote statistic). But if you want a different type of server OS, the options below are sage.
AlmaLinux is now available on Microsoft Azure
Just looked into Alma Linux which is working fine -- also for Domino V12 Beta.
And I also have looked into a couple of other Linux versions.
Even for our Domino on Docker project I got most of them working.
Ubuntu base images have been problematic and I stopped testing them when running into issues. They are completly different animals from package manager point of view!
I still have them in the zoo for other testing outside Docker or as a Docker or K8s base OS.
Good candicates to work with are also SUSE Leap and VMware Photon OS -- which needs to get some packages installed.
I got it working even in our Domino Community Docker container.
And you can take a look into the dockerfiles which packages I needed to install.
But still, the tested environments for Domino V12 will be:
RHEL 7 + 8
CentOS 7
SUSE Enterprise server 15
The readme for Domino V12 beta outlines basic support for other platforms meeting certain kernel, glibc and libstdc++ requirements.
Those platforms are supported but not tested by HCL.
There are some platforms like CentOS Stream or Alma Linux that are more close to a RHEL 8 and which are likely to work a bit more smooth than others.
Debian and Ubuntu use a completly different package management and are a challenge.
Even testing for glibc and libstdc++versions is a challenge on those platforms.
SUSE has a different package manager as well. But they also install rpm for compatibility.
So I would be more a fan of SUSE Leap than on any Debian or Ubuntu based environments.
We will have to see how much support I can provide for my Domino Start Script on other platforms.
Also when you follow my blog, you might have seen some posts around glibc locale support for different platforms.
When you still think Domino should be running on all platforms, take a closer look!
The devil is in the detail and a vendor has to focus on the mainly used platforms.
I did a review and many many customers and partners are on CentOS.
And CentOS Stream is a good and stable product. I am continuing to use it for my production servers with Domino!
[ Daniel Nashed / https://blog.nashcom.de ]
Alma Linux might be another good solution, as it's picking up the mantle from Centos as it's replacement for being the replacement stable release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
We been running "unsupported" VMs with Ubuntu and Domino since R8. Other than having to install a missing library, it's been just as wonderfully stable as RedHat and CentOS, and you can upgrade Ubuntu in-place. We also have a few clients that do not choose CentOS as their Linux distro, for one reason or another, and choose to run Domino on Ubuntu. In fact, just like HCL Domino, it's expected to simply take a VM snapshot, and type do-release-upgrade, to be on the next version of Ubuntu.
The Astra Linux (the Debian derivative from Russia) is already supported as a Domino system platform. Adding the Ubuntu platform support will be the logical next step.
I would look at Centos Streams. But it would be also beneficial to have other platforms certified.
It's true that the classical CentOS 8 is getting a EOL. But that doesn't mean you can't use CentOS 8 Streams. There is no real rush to move away from CentOS! It's just getting updates faster and is planned to be one dot release of RHEL. In general this an understandable move, which makes sense for RedHat.
CentOS 8 Streams continues to be a stable, enterprise OS.
There are other interesting platforms like SUSE Leap, which have stable releases.
It a bit complicated to support fast moving distributions.
Even HCL might have Domino support for more platforms, this will not mean that those are fully supported platforms.
The UBI from RedHat is already used by the HCL Domino image, which is also a streams release by the way. HCL is using this image to have a stable, reliable platform.
It makes sense to support more platforms like Astra Linux which is a Debian based platform. But "support" in this case might not meet it is "certificed" by HCL and will always work when the OS is updated!
Personally I would love to see it as part of the Debian package. Most solutions like Ubuntu rely on the Debian distro. So by making it Debian native it would open the opportunity to many other platforms as well.