Re: [Networker] Linux vs. Solaris
2007-03-08 06:36:32
We run a shop comprising a something like 17 NSR servers (down from many
more though) with some several hundred clients. The majority are
dedicated NSR servers running RHEL3 going to RHEL4, but there are
Solaris, Tru64 and HPUX ones in there as well which are standalone or
support a few related applications. In general the only time the
non-Linux servers give us issues is from hardware failure.
The biggest pain we have is not Networker itself, but the Linux platform
and mostly around device management and drivers. Things like zoning in
and out libraries, drives and storage pretty much require reboots to be
sure devices wont change order on the next reboot, which has happened a
number of times to the unwary. Not terribly hard to take care of when
you are aware of it, but painful when you know cfgadm can take care of
it easily in Solaris without the hassle.
The other aspect is getting meaningful debugging. We have linux boxes
acting as AFTD storage nodes that have performance issues with their
storage. Simple things like reliable iostat output are a tall order.
Error messages which are either missing, abrupt and require manual
decoding also hamper diagnosing device issues. RH support isnt much
help either - on occasions we were talking to people who didnt know what
a SAN was.
There were random hangs of our SAN based /nsr filesystems caused by
someone running "changers". In diagnosing that we installed a different
driver for the NICs to get netdumps, which caused certain Tru64 clients
to hang the NSR server with stuck sockets. We couldnt do disk dumps
because the driver to support that on our SCSI controller hung the box
on boot.
Why Linux then? Its one of our "strategic" platforms and cost based. A
reboot here and some nashing of teeth there by the admins doesnt amount
to much of an argument against the counting of beans.
Disclaimer: yes, I am unashamedly pro-Solaris, but if linux didnt cause
us trouble I would not have cared... :)
Stan Horwitz wrote:
Can someone point me to any documentation that compares the features of
the NetWorker server for Linux vs. Solaris? I am trying to convince
some people that migrating our NetWorker server from Solaris to Linux
is not in my employer's best interest.
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