Dibbler's Net

I have been accused of not liking linux. Mainly because I prefer to use FreeBSD or Solaris.

Now for the history part (If you don’t care about the history skip this section).
    The first Unix I touched growing up was AIX and AT&T Unix. With that and my windows 3.1 knowledge I started to learn more about what I could learn when not at work. Back home I had windows 3.1 machines and some OS/2 so why not find out more about unix. It was then that I compiled and ran my fist linux kernel on a 3.5 floppy (yes this is a long time ago). My employer at the time wasn’t going to give me an IBM server and a copy of AIX to take home and play with so I had to find other options. For me liunux was great. I connected with it and I could use it at home. So I used linux for a long time, compiling kernels, tweaking applications, I was a true adopter. Over time I had the opportunity to have a T1 into my company’s small office and was going to setup some servers. One server we were co-hosting was an sparc 5 running Solaris. I was already familiar with Solaris and had setup a linux server for basic mail and dns and wanted to try something new. A friend of mine was running a white box router running NetBSD and a T1 card. This intrigued me as cisco routers were costly and this was another option. Wanting to know more and being cheap I tried FreeBSD instead of NetBSD. So for many years I ran linux, solaris and freebsd all very happy with each other.

What changed ? In some ways OS’s are like relationship’s. My relationship with windows was ok, it ran most of my games and paid the bills. With Solaris I kept my skills up and work also used it along with AIX so I had a friend in the Unix world. Now Linux and FreeBSD I used only at my company and they were good friends. We had moved up and were doing hosting of applications and websites. Those servers were making money and my friends didn’t require much of me. Then it happened, this os that had been my friend, stayed compatible when I gave it new hardware, didn’t use up all my money for memory, and ran applications with little down time. That friend had betrayed me, opening itself up and giving away my system, bandwidth, customers data and everything to some cracker from another country. I had been faithful and patched but that was not enough. A memory hole had allowed for a web application to let someone in and then they elevated to root and used my system to spam. Now that is the overly dramatic version. In reality it was 4 days of my life with no sleep and it made me very unhappy. Everything on that server moved to the FreeBSD one and I had no more issues.

Today: Well I could say that FreeBSD has a better network stack, but I can’t find the data to prove that like in the old days. I could say that Solaris is a better commercial Unix OS than Linux but really that would be hard to prove. In the end it comes down to preference. I stopped using OS/2 because they stopped making it. I stopped using my Amiga for the same reason. I have nothing against Linux other than at one time in my life it scarred me. Since then I have preferred FreeBSD for small systems and shops or where cost is an issue. For anything larger or more commercial I prefer Solaris as the customer can have the full support. In the end I even agree and prefer that there are times where Windows is the right choice of OS. The difference here is that I don’t miss anything by skipping Linux and using FreeBSD or Solaris. If I did then for that I would use Linux. I think it’s important to note that we have so many good choices and really I don’t hate Linux I just had a bad personal experience. Will I use Linux again ? Yes if the need is there then I will.

D~

As part of Sun’s Datacenter and new multi-core servers they have released LDOM’s (Logical Domains) which pair well with Solaris Zone’s. As with any new technology it’s nice to have functional assessments. Sun has posted the above linked blueprint which details overall sever capacity and functionality when using virtualization. Virtual is the current buzzword, but at the same time you are getting more cpu’s and really more cores per cpu so there is a lot of processing power. The old belief of one application per physical box needs to change. As the blueprint shows when using an application like tomcat there is a real advantage to running more copies of tomcat with a smaller dedicated amount of cpu and memory then to run one large instance of Tomcat. As many applications and languages are not core capable so putting them in virtual servers make it more compatible and better performance. Now I don’t want to give away the big results but the pdf is worth reading as they are able to almost double TPS with their web based application on a single server.

Good to keep in mind before buying your next application server.

D~

Symantec last year really tried to enter the Server Provisioning and Data Center Management with it’s product of Veritas Provisioning Manager 5.x Since 2007 Symantec has really stalled on Unix software development and features. I mentioned this before when comparing Clustering software. It really seems that Symantec has lost it’s vision on what used to be Veritas’ core markets.

So Friday I had the opportunity to see Sun’s upgrade to their N1 product. The new Sun xVM Provisioning. Now xVM to Sun is a category of products including the recent buy of VirtualBox. For anyone who had to use N1 you will be amazed at where Sun has come. The demo I saw was the 1.1 version of the Product.

So in comparison xVM does almost everything VPM does. It does lack full drive imaging that VPM has. But in real life use we had issues with that VPM feature. For bare metal provisioning xVM supports software they give you for remote proxies that do DHCP, BOOTP, and all the other needs for remote network OS imaging. They also support direct IPMI for handling auto server reboots and remote firmware updates (which is a really nice feature).

xVM will also support LDOM’s and zone’s in 2.0 which VPM still won’t really support at all and doesn’t plan on it. It also had real issues with T1000 hardware and it’s mini-os. There is also alot riding on the new Knowledge base portion they plan to have in 2.0.

Overall both products do OS installs using Jumpstart but xVM does it a bit better. They will both push software and run custom scripts. Both will do rollbacks but in a very different way. I liked what I saw for compliance reporting by xVM but the ability to do file level system and image comparisons worked well in VPM.

Overall Sun showed off a really nice version 1 product that almost makes you forget how complicated N1 provisioning was. At the same time look how few updates or new features are coming from Symantec in an area that should be dynamic and constantly growing right now. A year ago Symantec said that the Datacenter was their big core market moving forward. Somehow we just haven’t seen this happen.

This is now the second Sun vs Symantec product look I have done. So am I just hating Symantec and loving on Sun ? I would say no. I think that like many large corporate buys Symantec bought Veritas for a core group of products and customers. It seems that Unix and Datacenter were not that core. Sun on the other hand is going into a second life of sorts on putting out good hardware and challenging the software market. Right now no one is really challenging them in this area. Remember at one point people declared Sun dead and was asking who would buy them.

D~

Caveat. The opinions above are my personal thoughts. I have used VPM 5.x and have seen a product demo of xVM 1.1 so I haven’t gotten as deep and dirty into xVM.