Hello
You posed some questions
These are aspects I am seeing with our local customers of NetApp+Linux.
1. AFAIK CentOS is still a recompile of RedHat
2. See http://centos.org/
3. And, KickStarts work fine for me in my little DEV environment.
4. Oracle "Unbreakable" Linux see oss.oracle.com seems to still be a RedHat-based environment
5. I am not aware of anyone using the Oracle Linux product ... even for Oracle. Perhaps someone in COH-NUG does??
6. I am not aware of anyone using OpenSuSE in place of SLES ... except for play. Perhaps someone in COH-NUG does??
7. COH-NUG customer(s) *are* using Linux via FCP & some iSCSI ... but it seems to be CentOS or SLES mostly
-- with Oracle especially and/or WAMP-like Web Servers
8. To see Interop "http://now.netapp.com/matrix/"
9. You will want to use the Host Utils from NetApp.
10. Interestingly Linux seems to be a bit more "chatty" than let's say Windows / Unix ... when *checking* that there secondary paths to the NetApp controllers are alive per se.
11. There are current NetApp releases of ONTAP that do support NFS v2 still.
12. BTW, I have been seeing much better maturity in the SLES mpio sw lately than in previous releases. Also, SLES iSCSI SW Initiator ... I have not played with that yet.