Hybrid Environment

[john_sm]

Hey Guys, I am still in a thinking stage and will like to learn from your experience, and was wondering if any of you folks have a hybrid environment i.e. Linux and Proprietary systems and what kind of issues do you run into. And also, what pieces of technology you have - which are open source and which ones you have are proprietary and any changes you anticipate 1 year out. Greatly appreciate your help. - John Smith

[Rob Leadbeater]

Hi John,

That's a very vague question... Can you be a bit more specific about what you're trying to do...?

Cheers,

Rob

[Don Vanco - Linux Ninja]

There's really no way to answer that. There are many variables -
Applications?
*NIX admin capability?

I can't speak for everyone, and I tend to deal more with large Enterprise customers, but my experience has been:
- that if a shop is *NIX savvy they will typically have a number of machines mixed but Windoze is a minority
- that if a shop is mostly run on Windows core they stick pretty much with Windows

The SMB space is a little different - it's not at all uncommon to see a Windows server doing things like Exchange or SQL and a Linux server (or two) doing file & print and firewall/NAT/Internet uplink.

A year out?
Microsoft will be explaining why "Product X" is going to be late(r) and/or broken
Linux will be 3 months ahead from where it was expected to be.

But I might be a tiny bit biased....


Tell us a bit more about the application and admin space you deal with and we'll be able to comment further.

YMMV
Don

[Robert Walker_8]

Gday,

We have around 300 servers (Physical and Virtual) of which 25 are bigger UNIX/Linux systems - the remaining are Windows.

We have two teams - Windoze and UNIX/Linux. We have up until a few years ago used Tru64 which is a BSD derivative of UNIX and have moved to Redhat (for Support) which is more like System V of UNIX.

I'd say that most admins who use *NIX could probably cope (as we did) but as with every *NIX its a matter of where things are placed. On a second thought this is also the case with Windows as well! :)

Generally the *NIX systems are larger database servers and thus dont have a lot of users on them. The advantage with Redhat as opposed to Tru64 we have found is that there is more software for it. Unfortunately Tru64 back in 2002 was given the kiss of death - otherwise it was a reasonable OS.

Regards,

Robert.

[dirk dierickx]

unless you can start from scratch, you can be sure there will be a lot of proprietary software and hardware in a data center.

trying to make these things work together requires a lot of shell/perl/... scripting and if you are lucky it will work good enough (tm).

the funs starts when you bring in the vendors, through highly expensive consultancy services, and even they are banging their heads on the wall from time to time.

simply, situations like this, could not be more in favor of open standards.