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I manage number of Solaris servers for a major university and we face the decision of switching to RHEL every budget cycle. We are already moving some over piece by piece. I will note that OpenSolaris is promising, and tools like dtrace and zfs, if positioned correctly, can give Solaris better leverage than they do.
What are the advantages of Solaris and RHEL in these settings over FreeBSD? Is it all about commercial support? I've found FreeBSD to be a nicer environment from a few aspects - better man pages than the GNU world and less SysV-vs-BSD cruft than Solaris. But my perspective is based on my experience as an operator rather than any big-picture considerations.
Zones, ZFS, and DTrace are the main differentiating technical advantages for Solaris.
Linux: Seg-fault in the gcc toolchain. After casting about for several days, we couldn't even find someone willing to take our money to fix it. Digging into the code (ld), it's so cryptic it may as well be written in undocumented assembler. Responses from mailing lists and forums: "Go back to Windows" "Restructure your project to avoid that problem" "Why are you complaining, fix it yourself, it's open source" etc. We couldn't submit a test case, because it would have required making public a lot of code containing trade secrets.
Solaris: Seg-fault in the Solaris compiler toolchain. We called Sun, and were talking directly to dev tools engineers within minutes. They put the case on 24 hour support and had a patch for us to test a day later. We could submit a reproducible case because Sun accepted the code under NDA.
Not the kind of thing that shows up in feature bullet point comparisons, but when you have 30 developers held up on one side and the clients need the code to calculate their bid for an eleven-figure project (as in this case), it makes a difference.
In other words, Sun is at a disadvantage, since one of their main selling points requires an understanding of IT risks that most people, unfortunately, do not have. IT guys may think linux is 'cheaper' but they don't have their end-users' acute desire to minimise the already-remote chances of some random problem costing them millions in commission. Edit - it is also an unfortunate reality that being able to pin the problem on Sun (or Microsoft, etc) can save your career in a situation like this. There's no-one to blame if you are using open source and it goes wrong. The buck stops with you not just for your code, but for the code of any free tools you are using. I wish that wasn't how it worked, but there it is.
Plus, if you stay 'on piste' doing stuff that has been proven to work (you could hardly argue against Linux + apache for example), you have a relatively small chance of stepping on these engineering landmines.
Linux vs. Solaris - Linux: Seg-fault in the gcc toolchain. After casting about for several days, we couldn't even find someone willing to take our money to fix it. Digging into the code (ld), it's so cryptic it may as well be written in undocumented assembler. Responses from mailing lists and forums: "Go back to Windows" "Restructure your project to avoid that problem" "Why are you complaining, fix it yourself, it's…
I don't know how Sun's support compares to the various commercial distros, but comparing an unsupported Linux install to a supported Solaris install isn't an apples-to-apples comparison.
What are the advantages of Solaris and RHEL in these settings over FreeBSD? Is it all about commercial support? I've found FreeBSD to be a nicer environment from a few aspects - better man pages than the GNU world and less SysV-vs-BSD cruft than Solaris. But my perspective is based on my experience as an operator rather than any big-picture considerations.
Zones, ZFS, and DTrace are the main differentiating technical advantages for Solaris.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Zones, ZFS, and DTrace are the main differentiating technical advantages for Solaris.
Zones are inferior to almost every other OS's virtualization/isolation strategy, a fact that Sun seems to be recognizing now. If virtualization is a key part of your IT strategy --- and it is for most large enterprises --- Solaris isn't your OS.
Sun never said that zones were the ultimate in virutalization - which is why they are coming out with XVM (their Xen implementation, basically).
I have made plenty of actual greenbacks with zones.
I have run both side by side, and still do run Linux for some customers and Solaris for others. Linux wins on ease of installation and apps available, Solaris wins on just about everything else (better threading, VM pager, etc).
If you have the source code to your application and it runs on both platforms, Solaris will run it better.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Zones, ZFS, and DTrace are the main differentiating technical advantages for Solaris.
Zones are inferior to almost every other OS's virtualization/isolation strategy, a fact that Sun seems to be recognizing now. If virtualization is a key part of your IT strategy --- and it is for most large enterprises --- Solaris isn't your OS.
There are plenty of things that suck about Solaris -- zones aren't one of them.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Zones, ZFS, and DTrace are the main differentiating technical advantages for Solaris.
ZFS is now available on FreeBSD and it features jails. I haven't kept up with it in a while regarding dtrace support though.
Granted I know I picked a random version (7.0 RC1), but the differences in maturity between the platforms is astonishing. This isn't a big deal when it's something that might at worst take rebooting to recover from (say, a SMP related crash), but with filesystems it's a little more crucial that they come through.