21–30 of 42 posts
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.
Solaris x86 vs RHEL is a no-brainer from a budgetary perspective.
Over the past ten years Sun has NOT had their story straight on the availability of Solaris x86 ISOs and support patches (formerly packaged as X_Recommended bundles). While I could download x86 and install it when I was considering trying it out for an important but non-funded project (replacing authoritative DNS servers for our domain), AFAIK the only way to install updates was to download individual patches from a FTP server and apply them one by one -- and there was no way to tell which applied or why.
I think CentOS is saving RHEL's market penetration... if CentOS (or equivalent) wasn't available to cover all of those little cases that nobody would ever fund in a business, all of the Linux expertise would move on to other distros. I think Sun might have figured that out now (OpenSolaris), but if not they have an even harder road ahead as they continue to lose more market share.
To this day, I have never owned a computer that ran Solaris. However, I work on a project with over 500 Linux production servers. Serves Sun right for not being nice to me when I was nineteen.
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…
If you pay for support, you get support. I doubt that there would have been much difference in your experience if you were paying for a support contract with one of the larger Linux distributors, like Redhat or Novell. Linux doesn't mean you're stuck without vendor support, although that's a common misconception. I don't know how Sun's support compares to the various commercial distros, but comparing an unsupported L…
What would be interesting however, would be a nice comparison of a supported Linux with a supported Solaris.
Then again, when you've paid for Linux support, do what is price difference between it and Solaris then? Whit is the price difference between a supported Solaris install and a supported Red-Hat install? Is Red-Hat significantly cheaper? Does it's less restrictive licensing bring about an advantage? Does it have features that compare with Solaris?
In addition to Red-Hat, Novell and supported Ubuntu are also worth talking about. Ubuntu may be free, but support licenses sure aren't.
You could also then compare supported Linux distros to unsupported Linux distros, but that's a whole other box of worms.
No it is not. 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 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.
Only someone who hasn't actually USED zones would say that. 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.
On the other hand, you didn't actually make any arguments here. All you did was assert that I'd never used the zones feature, make a point about something unrelated to zones, and then say that you made money with zones. Nobody is disputing that there is money to be made selling people Solaris instead of Linux.
I would at this point be more comfortable running applications under FreeBSD jails than zones, but, for obvious reasons, I would be much more comfortable running those same applications under virtualized Linux.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
In my experience, Solaris zones and VMWare's virtualization offerings are the most solid and reliable virtualization solutions available (VMWare is quite pricey though). Zones are the best game in town when you need OS level virtualization. There are plenty of things that suck about Solaris -- zones aren't one of them.
Solaris Zones aren't virtualization. They're an isolation feature that tries to find all the shared kernel namespaces between applications to present the illusion of multiple machines. "Zoned" applications share a running kernel instance, and share a number of kernel namespaces that are not carefully isolated.
VMWare images do not share kernels. Their entire running state can be frozen and shipped across a network (or marshalled out to an iSCSI SAN) on demand.
I think Solaris Zones are a pretty crappy answer to "virtualization". It's basically just a stronger version of chroot. It's inferior to VMWare-style virtualization on security (all zones on a single Solaris instance are vulnerable to the same kernel flaws, and kernel flaws have been the majority of Solaris security issues over the past several years), and they're inferior on management and logistics.
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.
Enterprise grade support comes to mind.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In my experience, Solaris zones and VMWare's virtualization offerings are the most solid and reliable virtualization solutions available (VMWare is quite pricey though). Zones are the best game in town when you need OS level virtualization. There are plenty of things that suck about Solaris -- zones aren't one of them.
You're almost making an apples-to-oranges comparison here, albeit a comparison I begged you to make. Solaris Zones aren't virtualization. They're an isolation feature that tries to find all the shared kernel namespaces between applications to present the illusion of multiple machines. "Zoned" applications share a running kernel instance, and share a number of kernel namespaces that are not carefully isolated. VMWare…
Interesting read. Especially considering the school of engineering at my university just replaced its last Solaris station in favor of some flavor of Linux.