As an employee of Sun Microsystems Federal, my big boss is Bill Vass. Bill recently posted a blog entry which references a comparison chart between Solaris 10 and Red Hat EL 5. As the primary author of the comparison chart I felt that I should come out from behind the veil of my COO. Admittedly, the list is composed from the point of view of a long time (12 years) Sun employee and Solaris ambassador. Although I tried to be as complete as possible in collecting the relevant RHEL 5 information, there may be items that I missed.
Feel free to let me know where I made mistakes and provide your input and comments so that the list can continue to be as complete as possible. It's somewhat like using the "open source" methodology to put many eyes on the code to ensure correctness. Go ahead! I can take it!
The general point of the chart should lead you to the conclusion that I've stated before, namely:
- Solaris costs less than Red Hat
- Solaris does more than Red Hat
- Solaris runs on more SPARC and X86/X64 platforms than Red Hat
- Solaris is developed as an open source project
Download Solaris today or check out the OpenSolaris source code. While you're at it, you might want to join the xVM community for open virtualization server and management development.
Why should you care?
There are a wide variety of products on which you can base you computing infrastructure. Having the most complete and correct information can help you to make decisions based upon facts rather than religious factors.
I guess it's the "feeling" that people get with the word. Linux was always an open and free OS. Solaris, used to be commercial.
RedHat, while the OS being a bit bloated (I run RHEL), has a very strong marketing engine behind it. Maybe Solaris should do the same.
Posted by Michael Hendrickx on December 12, 2007 at 11:31 PM EST #
One point of clarification - Solaris is not developed as an open source project. OpenSolaris is, but Solaris is not.
To understand my point of view, point me to a public source code repository where I can the source code that was used to generate Solaris 10 kernel patch 127111-05 released today. In contrast, refer to the latest RHEL 5 kernel update at https://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2007-0993.html. Notice that the source rpm is available.
Posted by Mike Gerdts on December 12, 2007 at 11:33 PM EST #
Yes, but does Solaris x86 run Oracle 11? How about Acrobat (for our sunray farm)?
Thankfully, it runs Sun's App Server. (our main j2ee environment)
We are trying to move as much stuff as possible to Solaris x86 and avoid linux for the reasons that you outlined above.
The main issue is a few major apps are not exactly providing the level of support that they claim in their press releases. If oracle is still using solaris x86 as its main development platform, then why does that platform lag all of the others by 6-12 months for all patches?
Thankfully, we are looking to postgres due to the cost of oracle's maintenance. Of course, with 50+ apps, we will not be able to flip the switch overnight.
So please find out who is responsible for the ISV relationships and see if you can send them some cash to at least make it look like they care about solaris x86 as much as they care about AIX and two different HPUX platforms (including one that has been declared dead by its vendor)
Posted by John on December 12, 2007 at 11:39 PM EST #
Thanks to all for your comments.
Solaris 10 is still in a transitional state in the open source process. While I will admit that not all of the code is released, it is still light years ahead of AIX, HP-UX and some other products in that the community can look at the code and contribute to advanced technologies such as DTrace, ZFS and others that eventually get back ported into Solaris 10.
As time progresses additional product (xVM, Solaris Next, Project Indiana appliances) will be derived from the OpenSolaris code base.
Regarding out ISV support: It is definitely on the upswing and Sun anticipates that our OEM agreements with Dell and IBM will increase our x64 volume to such a level that ISV cannot ignore it.
Posted by Jim Laurent on December 13, 2007 at 11:26 AM EST #
I heard somewhere what Solaris been opensource project.
Posted by Johny B on December 17, 2007 at 08:08 PM EST #
Yes,
See www.opensolaris.org
Posted by Jim Laurent on December 17, 2007 at 09:12 PM EST #
You have likely read in many places that Solaris is open source. At best, this is misleading. Jim points you to opensolaris.org which shares much code with Solaris and is a very good indication of how Solaris works. However, if you are not getting the service you need from Sun, you cannot get the exact source code that was used for building Solaris (including latest patches) to make the modifications you want/need to make.
As both OpenSolaris and Solaris have had continued development from their branch point a couple of years ago, simply taking current code from OpenSolaris and compiling on Solaris becomes much more troublesome. If you need to change code that has had a lot of feature development in OpenSolaris and numerous bug fixes in Solaris, making modifications to the OpenSolaris code to work on Solaris without reversing the bug fixes that are in Solaris is unlikely to be a trivial task.
Saying Solaris is Open Source and pointing at OpenSolaris is akin to saying that Cisco's IOS or NetApp's OnTap are open source and pointing at the BSD source trees that they diverged from many years ago.
Posted by Mike Gerdts on December 17, 2007 at 11:36 PM EST #
http://unixconsole.blogspot.com/2006/10/solaris-powerpc-code-released.html
to the list of architectures supported. I believe Linux supports it as well. POWER and PowerPC are not the same.
-Vivek
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Posted by Jim Laurent on January 15, 2008 at 12:19 PM EST #
Hi all, maybe a little bit offtopic, but I guess appropriate, because I'm comparing Solaris x86 against Novell SLES10. We are discussing of migrating some Sun Server from Sparc to Solaris x86 or SLES10 because of better CPU single-speed performance for x86 servers compared to Sparc.
As I'm maintainer of all this systems, I would go currently to SLES 10 because of two simple facts
1.) Package Management is a nightmare on Solaris, if you want to be flexible and not install the entire package cluster.
SLES10 has Yast now since years, which is much better for me for installing fine grained system adding or deleting package, checking dependecies, etc. Solaris has nothing like that and I know them all (pkgadd, pkgrm, progreg ...). If you have installed a minimum system of Solaris, there is no yast to add or remove some programs easily, because
- the dependencies of existing packages are maintained badly. (What happens if i delete package xxx ..., what is it good for, I need to install e.g a missing package in a simple vt100 gui = yast1 or a X-Windows based gui=yast2).
- you have no overview of all available packages of the installation medium like you do in yast.
If you have ever worked with the package management of yast and try to minimize a system (i maintain DMZ machines, where you want to have only installed minimal packages), you find pkgadd/del not appropriate at all. We have tried to create a baseline security to get rid of the unnecessary packages in solaris, but gave up finally because of the unclear dependecies and no tool that helped us. (progreg has some features of yast, but far not enough).
2.) Linux has DBRD (SAN for the poor ...)
With DBRD you can replicate Disks from one location to a secound location on IP basis. Perfect for a DMZ, where you don't want to have SANS, getting mad with rsync, etc. see http://www.linbit.com/de/drbd/drbd/
Conclusio:
- Give me those two features in Solaris x86, and I will be happy to migrate from SLES10 to Solaris x86, especially the bad package management in Solaris I do hate since years even in Sparc Solaris.
Posted by Thomas Fuerle on February 10, 2008 at 12:48 PM EST #
Thomas,
Thanks for posting your comments about Solaris packaging. As you may know, Ian Murdock (inventor of the Debian distro) is now at Sun and working towards making Solaris easier to use.
One of the projects under development is the Image Packaging System.
http://opensolaris.org/os/project/pkg/
It has already been implement in "Project Indiana" which you can download and try out:
http://opensolaris.org/os/project/indiana/
Posted by Jim Laurent on February 10, 2008 at 09:54 PM EST #
Jim,
I did some reasearch to give you good answers, here the are.
ad Image Packing System: I'm happy about any progress with packaging, but as you wrote it is part of Opensolaris (Project Indiana) and not solaris 10.
But I'm a commercial user, so I need it in Solaris 10, otherwise it more or less does not exist for me (not supported ...). And your blog is Solaris versus RHEL5/SLES10 and not opensolaris versus fedora/opensuse.
2.) Project Caiman
When I did my research about what you wrote, I found this project http://opensolaris.org/os/project/caiman/, which addresses also this packaging issues. There is a interesting PDF (http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/install/files/install_strategy.pdf), which points out my problems rather verbose (e.g see - 2.1.3 Software Maintaince, keywords minimum installation; - 2.2.8 Security). IMHO describes the final chapter describes rather interesting the need for a software like a "surprise" Yast like tool for Solaris.
3.) DBRD
There is nothing in Solaris like DBRD as far than I know. This is not a good argument anyway for me to argue, because it does not exist in SPARC, but when I'm forced to switch to a x86 system (see 5.), I get this option in linux, but not in solaris x86.
4.) Pitbull LX
We harden some of our DMZ machines with a third party software called pitbull, see www.argus-systems.com. For some reasons I don't know, if I change from Solaris SPARC to Solaris X86, they would need to charge me new licenses, because the need to pay this to Sun again for a x86 license, i.e. I cannot migrate a SPARC license to x86, if I understand all this correct. What does this mean ? It is not relevant, if I switch from Sun Sparc to Sun x86 or to SLES10/RHEL5, they would charge me new licenses anyway.
5.) The final question ... why did SPARC CPUs not follow moore's law ?
Why don't you build faster SPARC boxes, then I would just substitute boxes and that's it. But the boxes I use for the DMZ (typical 2 CPU boxes), which are Sun Fire 280 with 900 MHz are currently in the SF 245 on 1.6 GHz (5 years later after I bought the SF 280, where is ther moore's law here ?), which is half of a say SF X4150.
kind regards, thomas
Posted by Thomas Fuerle on February 12, 2008 at 06:33 PM EST #
Thomas,
Thanks again for your thoughtful and detailed comments. Let me discuss them one by one.
1. Yes, the Image Packaging System is being developed in the OpenSolaris community and WILL NOT be ported back to S10. We find that our enterprise and data center customers do not want a lot of changes. They value stability and "sameness" from a training and operations point of view over the latest buzzword. I mentioned it to show you that we understand the issues with SysV packaging and are working to correct it.
2. The installer also is targeted to the next release of Solaris sometime in 2009. Trust me, there are a lot of people inside of Sun who are asking the Solaris team to build a simple, consistent management tool as well.
3. I'm not familiar with DBRD and my high school German is now over 30 years old. We have some offerings on Solaris for remote disk replication that are open source. First of all, the ZFS file system has the send and receive command that can be sent over the network or SSH.
http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/819-5461/ftyxi?a=view
Secondly, the Sun Remote Mirror software is being released at http://www.opensolaris.org/os/project/avs/
4. I can't change the way that PitBull licenses their software but I can suggest that you use Solaris 10 Trusted Extension to provide high levels of security or to use the Solaris Security Toolkit to lock down your systems.
www.sun.com/software/security/jass
5. Moore's Law DOES NOT mention anything about computers going twice as fast every 18 months. It states that the number of transistors in a sq mm of silicon will double every 18-24 months. What engineers do with transistors is most important. At Sun with our UltraSparc T1 and T2 processors, we decided to increase the number of cores and threads on the chip as well as adding Crypto, 10 Gbit ethernet and PCI-E controllers on chip. Not all applications take full advantage of all these features but those who do break world records. In addition, by putting I/O channels on chip we can reduce the cost of a system while increasing the availability. Not all of those things are measured in performance terms.
See here:
http://www.sun.com/servers/coolthreads/t5220/benchmarks.jsp
Posted by Jim Laurent on February 12, 2008 at 08:37 PM EST #
Hi again,
sitting on the airport on the way to VMWARE World, here are some comments
1. and 2.) So, I guess everything said for commercial customers like me, sommer 2009 is my date to watch it again. Anyway, I will also play around with the blastwave site for setting up some basics like apache & more.
ad 3.) DBRD is really cool tool, like a SAN for the poor. More or less the revival of Redundancy Array of Inexpensive Disks on a network layer. And yes, they should offer their information in english too. OK, I can buy an EMC clarion or something like that; I just wantet to mention, that is something I miss in Solaris. I'm not very familar with ZFS and the Sun Mirror, but both of them remind me more on rsync, which I had till now.
ad 4.) I asked the guys of pitbull to give me more details, let's see. We are currently using jass as our baseline security tool and trusted solaris I have heard some lessons about, but we don't have it productive, I will play around with it and then I can better compare it.
ad 5.) yes, i know moore's law does not mentions, that computers must be going twice every 18 months, I just wanted to say in the x86 world, it is following this trend. Compare with www.top500.org.
Anyway, we will get a bunch of T5220 in the near future and then I can compare it.
I have just done a little test, which is important for us. Starting a Tomcat application on aSPARC SF V440 takes 20 secs., if do it on a x86 with 2.8 GHz, it takes 9 secs.
I run a couple of Tomcats on that machine, so single cpu speed is important for me.
when I have the t5220, I will download the cool threaded optimized tomcat version and then we see ...
and yes, I know that solaris is optimized for I/O, this is the reason we use for Databases, etc.
I'm quite not sure, how to approach the java world without a lot of threads like described above, when we talk about 20-50 processes which do not thread on a machine.
kind regards, thomas fuerle
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