what is the difference between HP-UX & RHEL?

[Alzhy · Accepted solution]

Back to question, Difference between RHEL and HP-UX:

HP-UX:
- Very Proprietary - runs only on the Sunset CPU (Itanium) as PARISC marches on to legendary history.
- Very conservative but stable (slow adoption of recent OS innovations)
- runs on expensive HW
- license and system support costs are high
- simplest among the UNICES to administer
- complete partitioning continuum (and now supports live partition migration)
- continued to be used in Tier 1 "Mission Critical Applications"
- Mature - over 25 years old.

RHEL:
- Open Source (aka "Free")
- Runs on the widest array of CPUs and Hardware including the Itanium System (but only up to RHEL 5.5 - after which RHEL ceases to support the Itanium system)
- Most conservative Linux Distribution - hence the most Stable
- Significant Lower TCO compared to HP-UX but RAS (reliability, availability and scaleability) now at par or even exceeds HP-UX (per my experience)
- Newer X86 HW now exceed the performance and efficiency of UNIX RISC based systems
- Support can be "challenging" from the vendors BUT "Community Support" is top notch.
- ISV Support is at parity with UNIX
- Administration could be complex (due to the many ways of doing things and the number of tools available) - but is otherwise an easy transition for UNIX administrators.
- core Linux kernel is around 20 years old. Redhat Distribuition is over a decade old and the most prevalent of all Linux Distributions.
- RHEL is the "foundation" of many other Linux distributions and so called Appliances and turnkey systems.

HTH.

[muruganantham raju]

Other Differences:

1) RHEL is supported on x86/64, IA and IBM Power6 architectures
2) HPVM provides virtualization of the servers in hpux. In Linux, Citrix to be used to create a virtual infrastructure
3) PRM (Process Resource Manager - a tool to control the amount of system resources that processes use) feature of HPUX is not available in Linux
4) There are Differences in Package management, software update, supported file systems, System administration etc

[Viktor Balogh]

Hi,

Since the two runs on completely different architectures, I would say that this question has not much sense. I prefer to list the commands which are identical on both platforms. These are base commands which aren't directly related to any hardware-specific things. E.g. think of the following:

ntp
date
tar
cpio
sh
ksh


These were only an example, and you must look at the man page of the commands as besides the main usage they can have some special parameters which are only there on a specific platform.

Regards,
Viktor

[Viktor Balogh]

btw, on HP-UX you can find the GNU tar under the name gtar. Both do the same, but gtar supports also files larger than 2Gbytes.

[Patrick Wallek]

>>btw, on HP-UX you can find the GNU tar under
>>the name gtar. Both do the same, but gtar
>>supports also files larger than 2Gbytes.

Unless this has changed on 11.31, you have to install Gnu tar yourself. It does not come with the OS.

The HP-UX native tar can handle files up to 8 GB.

[Alzhy]

Differences - My 5:
1.) HW Platforms (1 Platform versus a myriad for Linux)
2.) Security (NSA approved SELinux versus none on HP-UX)
3.) Scaleability (1024 cpus for Linux, ??? for HP-UX)
4.) OpenNess - HP-UX is closed source, RHEL is open source
5.) Clustering Options (5 for Linux with 2 free, only 2 for HP-UX - SG and Veritas)

Core UNIX COmmands -- ther are hardly any difference.


And clarification on:
"2) HPVM provides virtualization of the servers in hpux. In Linux, Citrix to be used to create a virtual infrastructure"
Linux has the richest "partitioning" schemes in the history of all OSes -- there is vMware(itself Linux based), KVM, vBox, Xen, etc, etc.

"3) PRM (Process Resource Manager - a tool to control the amount of system resources that processes use) feature of HPUX is not available in Linux" - and may I ad PSETS."

True - but this is rather insignifcant already as process binding and affinity is possible too on Linux.