Linux Enterprise Pitch
 

Although not technical I thought I could rely on my brothers in arms who are using Linux within the Enterprise. Currently I am leading a migration away from a much aging Solaris 9 install base, the options to replace this install base are:

Novell.
Solaris 10 (x86).
Redhat.

Now keep in mind I am living in Canada now and our sales pitch from Redhat was abysmal, Sun came into the meeting prepared and had answered all my "salt-in-wound" questions. RIght now I am at a lost for words as management is considering a Sun implementation. If you were in this position what route would you take?

Thanks again,

Inescapeableus

Well it's not up to other people to say what they think is the best solution, or even what the technically best solution is... it's down to what your abilities and resources are when looking at alternatives. if you run an solaris 9 house, then do all your solaris admins feel equally comfortable under Linux? I'd doubt it personally... do you have enough Linux knowledge to have the confidence that you will be able to cope in an unusual surrounding.

Thanks for the reply,

The "team" of administrators are equally divided with Solaris and Linux skill sets. Speaking for myself I know a lot of us pushing for Linux felt like we got the short end of the stick when Redhat presented their solution. The last thing I want within our environment is a majority of servers running Solaris... scary thought really.

I was a Linux guy....until I got my current job as a sys admin....Now my eyes are WIDE open to the wonderful world of Solaris (ZFS and Zones are the BEST ever)!

-C

Why scary ?

I WISH my OS problems were having to decide between Solaris and Linux...

QFT

Picking between Red Hat and Solaris is a trivial matter...there are a lot more strenuous problems out there...


Like when the owner of the company wants something that will require a new server and you have NO room on your rack, and he wants it NOW....ahh the wonders of Solaris Zones :)

not familiar with zones, but it seems to be just an equivalent or openVZ... nothing special there, and all that's bundled witin RedHat along with XEN and KVM... how many virtualization methods do you want? But if you're not even capable of managing something as simplistic as rack space, might as well give up in advance... :)

Anyway though, that's just point scoring which is really not going to help.

So what was wrong with the pitch? why do you care what the pitch was like...? Sure they *could* miss out on your custom if they suck, but if you *want* to use RedHat, why would you possibly let their presales staff put you off??

I didn't give up... I found a solution that works for my company. Using Solaris Zones and ZFS. It sounds like inescapeableus really wants to use Red Hat...How about stepping back and seeing what his company needs, instead of what he wants? If they happen to be the same, then great! If not...then start hitting those man pages :)

I'm not a OS nut. I use Solaris and Linux; at home and at work. But sometimes Linux people are like the MS nuts..."It's better/Easier in Linux". God I can hear our programmers now...

Anyway...It's all about company need. If a Red Hat solution is best then push for that. If you find Solaris to be better then "man up" :)
-C

Well, there's nothing wrong in going from Solaris 9 to Solaris 10. If you do choose x86, I'd go 64bit. And Sun does have nice hardware. There are pros and cons going with Sun hardware though. You get a LOM, but Sun doesn't do much to help out with BIOS info via dmidecode (though can be compiled, Sun just doesn't fill in interesting things like serial number for example).

With regards to Linux, our company prefers Novell SLES over Red Hat for infrastructure needs. It's a bit easier to maintain from our experience and doesn't need as much tweaking to make things work. So if you have to move to Linux, I'd go Novell (that may put me in a minority camp, but I've been doing Unix for 22+ years, and Novell's Linux distro is a lot smarter than Red Hat's).

We migrated a lot of infrastructure away from Solaris 7 (eww!) to SLES 9 and now SLES 10. But we still have a lot of Solaris around. Solaris wasn't worth beans until Solaris 10. BUT, you need to have the LATEST Solaris 10 (it's on a Linux like update pace right now). So don't use Sol 10 before the August 2007 release (IMHO).

Frankly, it would take A LOT of work to reimplement our site using Solaris rather than SLES. I mean, there's some nice things in Solaris, but we've got a lot of Windows interoperability working with the SLES setup that just isn't there at all with Solaris. And the nice things in Solaris, just aren't that interesting to us. YMMV.

Both OpenVZ and Zones provide a common set of equivalent features but each one have some specific ones that can make the difference depending on the needs.

OpenVZ has some features missing from Zones like I/O resource management and live migration.
OTOH, OpenVZ virtualize only a single Linux kernel at one time while Zones on x86 H/W allow simultaneous Solaris and (faked) Linux kernels 2.4 and 2.6.

Using ZFS to store the zones file systems is allowing extremely useful features like almost unlimited and instant zone snapshotting, cloning and rollback.

ahh well my knowledge in that area is minimal at best... obviously bow to your superior knowledge... but still, it's just give and take about there, hardly a reason to mandate an entire operating system on without specific reasons to the contrary.

migration = migrations.

Beware of using the technical issues as an escape for the more thorny organisational issues that occur with ANY migration.

People like to complain, don't hallucinate, current poor performance gives them an excuse to talk about something around the coffee machine/water dispenser. Truth is, they also have their workarounds built over the years, which will all come to nothing in a new unfamiliar environment.

What migration-leaders often do is harness the marketing of the supplier internally. In this case, it seems obvious who to go for.

What I can't understand is Red Hat's abysmal marketing. I thought they were "in the league".

You don't mention the $$$ difference. That's primordial.

Hello all,

All interesting points. I have been unable to reply as I have been deep within the trenches. Currently evaluating the two Operating System from numerous perspectives. Perhaps I may have come off too strong. I prefer the Redhat solution to Solaris in a lot of areas. I love the ZFS, D-trace and Zones technology, but within the environment they are going to be distributed in they play a very trivial role. Rather I suppose if you were to champion the merits of Linux in general what comes to mind?