Solaris vs Linux
- Thread starter Rich43
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I have only been using Solaris for a year, and at first the differences (Where stuff is in the file system, differences in commands etc) put me off,
But honestly speaking I would now choose to use Solaris on any server box over linux if I could.
Solaris has some very nice features;
ZFS - Awesome file system and disk management
Zones - Chroot Jails on steriods, with shared resources/filesystems, CPU limits and separate networking stacks if need be.
BrandZ zones - Emulates/translated the linux kernel calls down into the solaris kernel, allowing linux userspaces to run in a solaris zone, all under one solaris kernel.
RBAC - Role based access control for MUCH finer grained security of multi-user systems if needbe.
Trusted Extensions - Allows Military style document/network/file/folder 'Labeling' with only certain users having access to certain levels. For example 'Top Secret' docs cannot be copied+pasted into a lower security clearance file, or put onto a pen drive, or printed to a publicly accessible printer.
Dtrace - Live debugging of running apps, used for performance increasing and troubleshooting, very powerful.
Live Upgrade (Including live upgrade of zones) - 30 min automatic upgrade of your OS, leaving all your custom files intact (Upgrades while online, requiring only the downtime of a reboot to update the system).
Also allows you to rollback instantly to the old version of the OS if something does not quite work (ie your custom app dosnt like the new version or whatever (although this shouldn't happen as calls are kept backwards compatible between releases))
SMF - Service management, much nicer than init.d scripts with predictive healing/restarting of fails service, and allows contracts to generate 'guaranteed levels of service' (ie... can stop all your services coming up if your firewall has failed to start for example (can probably think of some better examples but it's late))
Other things to note:
Fully compatible with Linux apps (Gcc if needbe etc etc)
A stupidly fast, solid IP stack and Fiber Channel stack.
Much more 'observability' than linux tools into installed hardware, state of installed hardware (failure detection etc) (cfgadm -al, prtdiag, luxadm -e port commands).
Xen support in both 32 and 64 bit modes of solaris by default, allowing virtualised instances of solaris / anything else controlled by a solaris Dom0.
Yes, some of these features may, eventually in some form get into linux, and I am not saying linux is bad (for example before last year I have been using it for around 10 years (see 'How you got started with linux' thread) and still use it for my desktops)
... But what I do like about solaris, when it's my ass on the line for keeping servers up, is that the whole thing has been rigorously tested and vetted as one complete product before being released, even now with opensolaris, any updates back ported into the official solaris tree go through the same testing and code optimization by internal techs as the internally designed code.
Just the idea of a rock solid kernel to put everything on top of makes me sleep a little better.
There is probably tonnes of stuff I have missed out, but I hope you get an idea of why I like solaris.
And one last thing, this is not marketing babble, I have had first hand technical knowlege of all this stuff, and am over the whole 'this OS is better than yours' childishness years ago, if something was crap I would say something was crap (like i still thing linux is the better alternative for a rich desktop) .. but we are talking about servers here.
Hope this helps.
//TrX
EDIT: Also something I was planning to look into next week, is that I beleive solaris has/will soon have the ability to sign all apps with public / private key pairs. and so as an admin, you will be able to say "right, only allow apps signed by my companies key, or suns key (for base OS tools) to run".
Which would stop users compiling their own code / shell users compiling privilege escalation spolit code etc
Also check out sunrays (and the sun ray server software) for excellent thin client destops, and the sun secure global desktop (which i need to look into myself because it looks damn cool for an application centric approach to remote / workers desktops)
But honestly speaking I would now choose to use Solaris on any server box over linux if I could.
Solaris has some very nice features;
ZFS - Awesome file system and disk management
Zones - Chroot Jails on steriods, with shared resources/filesystems, CPU limits and separate networking stacks if need be.
BrandZ zones - Emulates/translated the linux kernel calls down into the solaris kernel, allowing linux userspaces to run in a solaris zone, all under one solaris kernel.
RBAC - Role based access control for MUCH finer grained security of multi-user systems if needbe.
Trusted Extensions - Allows Military style document/network/file/folder 'Labeling' with only certain users having access to certain levels. For example 'Top Secret' docs cannot be copied+pasted into a lower security clearance file, or put onto a pen drive, or printed to a publicly accessible printer.
Dtrace - Live debugging of running apps, used for performance increasing and troubleshooting, very powerful.
Live Upgrade (Including live upgrade of zones) - 30 min automatic upgrade of your OS, leaving all your custom files intact (Upgrades while online, requiring only the downtime of a reboot to update the system).
Also allows you to rollback instantly to the old version of the OS if something does not quite work (ie your custom app dosnt like the new version or whatever (although this shouldn't happen as calls are kept backwards compatible between releases))
SMF - Service management, much nicer than init.d scripts with predictive healing/restarting of fails service, and allows contracts to generate 'guaranteed levels of service' (ie... can stop all your services coming up if your firewall has failed to start for example (can probably think of some better examples but it's late))
Other things to note:
Fully compatible with Linux apps (Gcc if needbe etc etc)
A stupidly fast, solid IP stack and Fiber Channel stack.
Much more 'observability' than linux tools into installed hardware, state of installed hardware (failure detection etc) (cfgadm -al, prtdiag, luxadm -e port commands).
Xen support in both 32 and 64 bit modes of solaris by default, allowing virtualised instances of solaris / anything else controlled by a solaris Dom0.
Yes, some of these features may, eventually in some form get into linux, and I am not saying linux is bad (for example before last year I have been using it for around 10 years (see 'How you got started with linux' thread) and still use it for my desktops)
... But what I do like about solaris, when it's my ass on the line for keeping servers up, is that the whole thing has been rigorously tested and vetted as one complete product before being released, even now with opensolaris, any updates back ported into the official solaris tree go through the same testing and code optimization by internal techs as the internally designed code.
Just the idea of a rock solid kernel to put everything on top of makes me sleep a little better.
There is probably tonnes of stuff I have missed out, but I hope you get an idea of why I like solaris.
And one last thing, this is not marketing babble, I have had first hand technical knowlege of all this stuff, and am over the whole 'this OS is better than yours' childishness years ago, if something was crap I would say something was crap (like i still thing linux is the better alternative for a rich desktop) .. but we are talking about servers here.
Hope this helps.
//TrX
EDIT: Also something I was planning to look into next week, is that I beleive solaris has/will soon have the ability to sign all apps with public / private key pairs. and so as an admin, you will be able to say "right, only allow apps signed by my companies key, or suns key (for base OS tools) to run".
Which would stop users compiling their own code / shell users compiling privilege escalation spolit code etc
Also check out sunrays (and the sun ray server software) for excellent thin client destops, and the sun secure global desktop (which i need to look into myself because it looks damn cool for an application centric approach to remote / workers desktops)
Last edited:
Soldato
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Also Tier-1 vendor support and you can't really put Linux on "big iron". Linux is available on SPARC but won't be as optimised for the Sun hardware as Sun's OS.
I help look after 60+ Sun servers all with Solaris 10 and they're rock solid. I've had webservers with uptimes of over two years.
I help look after 60+ Sun servers all with Solaris 10 and they're rock solid. I've had webservers with uptimes of over two years.
In answer to what stops linux getting the special technologies that Sun has: Licensing. Sun licenses things like ZFS in a way that they're incompatible with the GPL and therefore can't be included in linux (the kernel). There is a project to put ZFS specifically in userspace so it doesn't need to be compiled in, but that raises questions around performance and stability. Still, that argument on that one is ongoing.
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You can put linux on Itanium though and it's lightening quick! We're seriously considering it for our next generation of name servers (that said, these days quad core Xeons are frightening fast running a bare bones linux install and they are substancially cheaper).
We moved from Solaris to RHEL for our critical unix based services in the last few years (a few reasons, we like Redhat support and it allowed us to standardize on HP server hardware among them)
I'm a big fan of solaris though and I'd really like to get one of the Ultra 24 workstations for a play at home. I also have a few projects coming up that I'm considering the coolthreads servers for.
I figure if I had a limitless budget I might go back to Sun/Solaris but for our needs at the moment, Linux (RHEL) offers us a better deal and the skill set to support it is more common.
I am generally interested in the reason for people moving away from sun, in your case, was it just the cost of solaris support? and are HP boxes THAT much cheaper than the sun boxes?
Btw, T2 processors rock, been playing with a few at work for webservers / db's. http://www.flickr.com/photos/trxuk/2307429608/
Mind you, for single thread performance, take a gander at the x4450 (quad intel quad cores) Personally I think they are awesome piece of kit/engineering, but it must be said I also work for sun.. so I will leave it for you to decide whether I am genuinely impressed or just trying to market stuff..
Ps... I hate marketing
//TrX
Man of Honour
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I am generally interested in the reason for people moving away from sun, in your case, was it just the cost of solaris support? and are HP boxes THAT much cheaper than the sun boxes?
Btw, T2 processors rock, been playing with a few at work for webservers / db's. http://www.flickr.com/photos/trxuk/2307429608/
Mind you, for single thread performance, take a gander at the x4450 (quad intel quad cores) Personally I think they are awesome piece of kit/engineering, but it must be said I also work for sun.. so I will leave it for you to decide whether I am genuinely impressed or just trying to market stuff..
Ps... I hate marketing
//TrX
Support costs are a little more for Solaris I think, obviously it adds up a little when you've got 20 core services boxes deployed.
The primary reason was the ability to move to HP hardware really, we have a good relationship with HP and they're reasonably priced with very good support (6 hour fix). Also I know if I need another HP hard drive or memory kit or whatever at short notice I'll always be able to get one from one of our suppliers in a couple of hours. Thats worth a lot sometimes...
I guess the other unspoken reason was we were much more comfortable with HP/RHEL, it was a known quantity for me and our systems guys. I like Solaris but I don't know it as well as RHEL at the end of the day.
My understanding of the T2 is it deals with multiple threads brilliantly but isn't too hot when it comes to floating point maths, what's your experience? One thing holding me back is the thought of having to go through all my code finding the floating point dependencies. Again, the known quantity thing comes in, I think sparc based chips could be good but I know the Itanium based HP servers are blindingly quick with code optimized for them
T1's has one FPU per chip, to service 32 threads, so FP performance sucked.
T2's were designed to have one FPU per core, which services 4 threads (if I remember correctly) to solve the problems the T1's faced with FP op's.
If you want to whip up some test code and send me the code i'll happily run it against a T2 and send you the output.
Have never had much todo with itanium's, but if you write good SMP code, I don't see how a blindingly fast itanium can beat 64 1.odd Ghz cores. Having said that, I understand there are many cases where single thread performance is needed for a task over multiple threads.
//TrX
T2's were designed to have one FPU per core, which services 4 threads (if I remember correctly) to solve the problems the T1's faced with FP op's.
If you want to whip up some test code and send me the code i'll happily run it against a T2 and send you the output.
Have never had much todo with itanium's, but if you write good SMP code, I don't see how a blindingly fast itanium can beat 64 1.odd Ghz cores. Having said that, I understand there are many cases where single thread performance is needed for a task over multiple threads.
//TrX
Our Solaris environment has slowly been moving to RHEL over the last couple of years. This is mainly centred around cost, when you have large compute farms / grids it doesn't really matter what goes in there and the reality is blades/HP whiteboxes are a lot cheaper than sparc hardware. Having said that, most of our core infrastructure boxes, database clusters and anything that is critical to our business lives on Sun kit. I think the other reason is we give our developers the choice and as most are fresh out of uni and have only ever played with Linux they all want to go Linux for their apps. The Niagra 2 is supposed to be awesome though, we are benchmarking one Sun gave us in our lab and all looks good so far.
Man of Honour
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Have to disagree, only in that both are relatively trouble free. Our old sun fire boxes are pretty reliable (the odd failed disk, PSU or whatever) but so are the HP servers we use and I think HP support is a shade better. Sparc hardware also costs the earth compared to x86..
On another note, Sun are offering a trial (I think it's two months off the top of my head) of their Ultra 24 workstations, have a play for two months and send it back if you don't like it. I'm tempted but I just know I'd end up keeping it...
Man of Honour
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It's not just the U24, you can ask for 'try before buy' on most of the newer kit, for 60 days, then decide to keep it or send it back.
Will be useful for a uni project next year
*and hi again all btw*
//TrX
Indeed, I wonder if they'll give me a coolthreads box, worth looking into I think...
and hello again
Soldato
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I've got large numbers of T1-based Sun Coolthreads servers because I have a large J2EE website and for WebLogic even T1s are awesome. I also use T1-based T2000s for OLTP (Oracle) and again these multi-threaded multi-core chips achieve amazing throughput. The only real problem with Sun's Coolthreads servers is getting enough jobs into them simultaneously!
Yup, for the right use cases the T1's are amazing... and the T2's just increase the number of use cases by getting rid of a few problems (like FP opts) (plus onchip 2x10Gb/s Ethernet controllers, and a hardware crypto unit.. IIRC, the mem controllers also on chip.)
BigRedShark, Did you want to pass some FP opts benchmark code my way to help you with your T2 decision?
