Come’on RedHat – give us the MSDN version for home labs and training.
I recently signed up for the RedHat Developer Program and have setup my lab system with a fully updated RedHat Enterprise Linux 7 operating system with all of the bells-and-whistles the OS provides.
The Developer Program not only gives you a fully licensed RHEL system, it also provides access to JBoss, and the RedHat Container Development Kit which contains a set of development tools and additional resources (Python, PHP, Ruby, OpenJDK, etc). All great stuff, especially for developers looking to hone their OpenSource development practices.
Unfortunately, for those of us on the systems side of the world (not hard-core developers) the package omits a couple of great RedHat products: Cloudforms and RedHat Virtualization.
I know that I could attempt to knit together the upstream versions of each of these (ManageIQ and oVirt), but there is a reason that the Cloudforms and RHV exist to save us from the complexity of configuring all of the components together. As a learning platform, the effort of researching numerous blog posts and reams of documentation for each project (and their pre-requisites) might be worthwhile, but for some one like me who is interested in learning more about Cloudforms/ManageIQ itself (automations, hooking into a lab VM environment, etc) it severely skews away from the objective I’m trying to educate myself on.
Microsoft has their MSDN – Microsoft Developer Network – that provides a license for a nominal fee (at the low end) that provides licensing for Windows OS installations (five licenses, many versions, both standard and Server), SQL, Exchange, SharePoint, Office and Office365, Azure, etc. Windows Server has Hyper-V as an option – it’s answer to RHV/oVirt. (I don’t believe they have a Cloudforms/ManageIQ alternative, though one might exist.)
I understand that MSDN is not free ($0.00 expense) like the RedHat Developer Program is, so it’s not a perfect comparison but Microsoft has a range of offerings price points. If a small ($99/year) cost would expand the RedHat option to include Cloudforms, RHV, and multiple server subscriptions (not the single RHEL instance), I could greatly expand my experience with the options RedHat provides.
So RedHat, what do you say? Expand the program for those of us who want to learn about the full breadth of RedHat products!