In When to use Solaris vs. Linux: Operating system comparison, I’d agree with a lot of the points made, particularly the wrap-up:
While I applaud Sun for getting on the bandwagon, and while it is true that imitation is the best form of flattery, I’m not sure if Sun might be a little too late to the dance. Linux just has too much momentum today, and trying to re invent Unix this way seems like a long-shot. Linux today is a real enterprise solution, used by almost all of corporate America, and the only OS that is actually growing in sales. On the one hand, while it is the hope of open system aficionados everywhere that this Sun venture succeeds, I’m not certain that as a company, Sun would have been smarter to stay with pure Solaris and their SPARC-based architecture and played to their strengths. This is what IBM has done around their System p architecture and it has served them very well in recent years. At the end of the day, you are what you are. I’m not certain that Sun really knows where they are today.
In my opinion, Sun’s objective has generally been to get or stay in various markets by competing with Linux as a presumably valuable open source option. This has led to a seeming corporate schizophrenia at Sun, with separate and aided missions to also sell proprietary hardware and a proprietary UNIX. Sun has provided many great open products, yet has a lot of trouble relinquishing control. Only recently have they decided that they loved Java and Solaris enough to really set them free. They would probably be better off making OpenSolaris interoperable with Linux by kernel and user space contribution. If Sun were to concentrate on providing better tools for Linux, we’d probably see a value added advantage for Sun, placing it in a good position for the future — If.
If you absolutely have to run Solaris I’d recommend OpenSolaris. Otherwise and always, I’d recommend Linux (which distro would be up for debate), as Linux is the agile answer. Linux is the answer that you will wish you had made in years to come, as everything will run on it, and it will run on everything. Efficiency and optimization should not come into play, as next month’s hardware will outpace tenfold the few and minor empirical differences in efficiency that can be argued for Solaris over Linux.
hmm…I must disagree! I started my career on SunOS 4.1.1 in 1996, back when Sun was everything. Around 2003 I started using Linux and I joined the “Linux Linux Linux” crowd, abandoning Solaris I promoted Linux and have spent the past year heading up Linux engineering for a very large hedge fund in London. Tonight I’m busy writing a paper which I hope will justify removing Linux and “re-deploying” Solaris. Why you ask?
RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) attempts to cover every aspect of the market and in doing so, offers some of the ugliest and most unstable solutions I have ever seen…and you PAY for it. Their support is beyond a complete joke…seriously it’s an ugly joke!
This is Red Hat Linux:
You can’t download a RHEL iso from Red Hat…WHY?
Red Hat Cluster is another joke!
Red Hat Satellite is a bank breaking excuse for a yum repo
Linux lvm….yeah it works….sort of
Linux systemtap….yeah it also works…sort of
Lets look at Sun:
All Solaris is free to download…you only pay for support
Sun Cluster is a polished product
Dtrace works
XFS works
Never mind all the glassfish and other free products Sun offers
I was fooled by the Linux hype….but when it comes to critical financial production…Solaris and OpenSolaris is the answer!
Linux vs Solaris
I have also worked on both sides of this argument. Currently I am pro Linux, but work in a Solaris central environment. Previously I worked in a large Linux environment. My arguments for Linux are, Serious cluster options, Oracle rac on commodity hardware, quicker adoption of new hardware into the Linux hcl, support for many file systems, and strength of the community. My arguments for Solaris are, Oracle on Large systems, Older programs will just work (aqualogic) I am not forced to install several different glibc versions, no kernel binary driver version hell, larger established admin base, Dtrace, ZFS and RBAC.
Rebuttal to the previous post.
Redhat support, the only time I called them was for a custom kernel version to support multiple drivers and a certain application. Redhat was quick to respond with a custom compiled kernel.
You can download the Desktop version and you can demo the Enterprise version. You are required to create an RHN account.
Redhat cluster is a joke, but Torque / Maui / Ganglia are serious cluster toolkits.
Satellite server is over priced, but so is ops center.
LVM works great. (never had a major issue with it, unlike ZFS)
SystemTap, is still in development it will eventually rival dtrace, but the truth is most admins do not have the Fu to use either.
The only reason to use RHEL is because an application requires it to be supportable. A good admin shop will handle most of the issues that would ever require support.
My issues with Solaris. Lack of good clustered file systems, QFS. Sun Cluster, the support response to any issue, is what is your patch level, oh yeah that is a known issue it was fixed in 142900-02 Or what ever patch you haven’t tested yet. Dtrace, great tool, requires great fu, most admins know about it but don’t have the skill set to use it, its like booting into KMDB. Ever feature you want to see in Solaris is always going to be in the next version. Sun has improved the integration of new features, but they are still behind the power curve, you will need to wait 18 – 36 months to leverage the newest widget (FC targets).
I can see a place for both Operating systems, both could learn a lot from each other.
Oh cant we just go and get along??