Adding Sun servers

[Martha Mueller]

Our company is considering adding some Sun servers. Do any of you HP administrators also have Sun servers? Would you care to give any recommendations or advice on this venture? How is the support from Sun?

Thanks.

Martha

[harry d brown jr]

Take the Sun FastTrack class, it'll bring your admins up to speed in a week.

[Martha Mueller]

Ok, that's some good advice. How do you think Sun compares with HP in both server and in support? We currently have some L1000's, some L2000's, and an N4000.

[harry d brown jr]

I guess you could say: It depends.

Solaris does not have LVM, unless you purchase Veritas. AND I SUGGEST YOU PURCHASE VERITAS, otherwise your life will be hell. I used to think (and I used to be correct) that HP was very proprietary, now Sun has them beat in that area.

You'll find a lot of product's available on sun first, and then "ported" to HP, but I'm seeing a change in that area, ever so slight, but still a trend.

I personally think the sun keyboard sucks - that's my second largest complaint.

We have moved some of our HP web servers to Sun, but I'm still benchmarking this, and we haven't proven anything concrete as to wether one is faster than the other.

live free or die

[Martha Mueller]

This is great information. How is their support? I have only heard bad things - as in almost non-existant - but wanted to hear from others.

[Darrell Allen]

Hi Martha,

That's an interesting question. I worked with both at my last job which was a large site with several hundred HP, Sun, and AIX servers. A number of my co-workers were pro Sun though I personally felt that we got better support from HP. Don't quote me but I believe basic Sun hardware support is done thru 3rd parties. We were large enough to get it from Sun.

Solaris doesn't have a sam equivalent and doesn't come with lvm nor jfs. lvm and jfs are available from Veritas which has quite a nice product family. Sun doesn't have a make_tape_recovery equivalent either though you can boot from cd and load from a tape of ufsdump'ed filesystems. You have more flexibility in what parts of the OS you build a system with (core OS vs full developer installs and some in between).

My feeling? HP is probably more "admin friendly" and Sun is more for "power admins" (real admins don't use gui's type thing). Both have performant servers. I can't speak to the cost vs perfomance (I'm a techie and dang proud of it!). As usual, the main differences in my eyes was at the sysadmin level (building servers, patching, alternate boot paths, mirroring, etc). At the command level, there's not a lot of major differences.

Darrell

[Peter Scott]

We have a mixture of Sun, HP-UX, IBM and Sequent kit and there is little to choose between them. Sales people will swear black is white and that their offering is better, but the only hangups I get are using ll on a Sun box every time I log in.

Configuring disk on a SAN can be a pain on Sun because you may have to add entried to the SD driver config module, and HP handles all that via ioscan.

Sun make it easier to add devices i.e. tapes or disks online as their kernel is modular and you can use modload and modunload to plug modules in and out on the fly. Solaris 8 has introduced some nice touches like running OS upgrades on mirror plexes while the OS is still running on the other plex. Sun also have a text file which is read by the kernel at boot time (/etc/system) that allows you to apply tuning parameters without having to rebuild a kernel every time you do so.

I hope this doesn't sound like a Sun sales pitch because all flavours of Unix have their idiosyncracies, the ideal version would take the best bits from each. It's fairly easy to match server for server if you look at the specs.

HTH

Pete Scott

[Bernie Vande Griend]

Heh. You're asking a dangerous question in an HP forum!
I supported Solaris and SUN servers of all types for 7 years. I think the support level is very similar to HP's. Sometimes its great, sometimes it sucks. SUN doesn't have a tool like ITRC and this forum however.
SUN hardware was quite reliable and stable for us, again quite similar to my experiences now with HP. SUN is by far the better marketer of its products and in a lot of situations, gives a better price. That isn't always the case, depending on your reseller and the volume you're dealing with.
I think its great for sys admins to have multiple platforms to deal with as it keeps them on their toes. However, having one OS is when dealing with patches, upgrades, Install servers, etc.
As a sysadmin things are very similar. I think is a bit easier because of sam and LVM, with Solaris you must purchase Volume Manager to have LVM capabilities.
Personally I think its good for companies to keep their options open. I for one wouldn't hesitate to buy a product from either vendor, but would purchase whatever was the best fit and best cost.

[Peter Scott]

On the subject of volume managers, Solstice disksuite comes with Solaris, it's on the Applications CD. If you purchase one of their storage arrays, i.e.an A5100 or a T3, then you get a rebadged version of Veritas thrown in with the price.

[Bernie Vande Griend]

2 things I wanted to add:
Although I said HP was a bit easier for administration, I think SUN is better in 2 areas: kernel and network administration.
The kernel is SUN is dynamic and only needs to be tweaked occasionally with /etc/system. HP's kernel must be watched much for closely.
SUN has been and still is (IMO) a leader in networking and its utilites and cards seem to be much easier to use. I miss a lot of the network utilities that I used with Solaris.
HP has made a lot of improvements with the kernel and networking with 11.0 and 11.11, but they have a bit to go yet in my opinion.

[Martha Mueller]

This is all very helpful information. I have never actually seen a Sun server, so I am grateful for the feedback.

Yes, we are working in a SAN environment. We have bought EMC's FC4700 - which used to be Data General.

[harry d brown jr · Accepted solution]

Peter,

I love this quote:

"Sales people will swear black is white and that their offering is better"

Darrell,

Sun does have an almost equiv to sam, its called admintool - but it's weak!

Personally, I used to despise IBM, until AIX. I started using the IBM RT, pre-AIX days. When the RS6000 came out with AIX, it was far superior than any other unix at the time. I can't speak for it today, because I haven't used one in 8 years. Maybe someday I can convince someone here to get me one, just as an R&D toy.


I usually forget that I have a sparc 5 under my desk. Martha, get a sparc 5 (less than 7grand US$) and take the FastTrack class, then come back and play. It will put you into the correct position to support the other boxes. Plus you'll be able to play.

In sun these are some of the equiv's to HP

package = swinstall
df -v = bdf
ls -l = ll
egrep -e str1 -e str2 * = grep -e str1 -e str2 *
admintool = sam (yeah, right)

Devices in SUN are very funky, but almost make sense, but also very difficult to remember (and if you can figure it out you should apply to the NSA), ie:

Ls ???l /dev
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 54 Aug 13 11:27 diskette -> ../devices/pci@1f,0/pci@1,1/ebus@1/fdthree@14,3023f0:c
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 54 Aug 13 11:27 diskette0 -> ../devices/pci@1f,0/pci@1,1/ebus@1/fdthree@14,3023f0:c
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 9 Aug 13 11:33 fd0c -> diskette0
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 58 Aug 13 11:27 rdiskette -> ../devices/pci@1f,0/pci@1,1/ebus@1/fdthree@14,3023f0:c,raw
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 58 Aug 13 11:27 rdiskette0 -> ../devices/pci@1f,0/pci@1,1/ebus@1/fdthree@14,3023f0:c,raw
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 Aug 13 11:33 rfd0c -> rdiskette0

[A. Clay Stephenson]

Hi Martha:

Up until about 3 years ago I was in a very intensive CAD/CAM environment with lots of HP's, Sun's, Silicon Graphics, DEC's, ... though now I am in a pure HP environment and life is much better - not because HP is that good but rather it's all one flavor. I can only say that the performance of Sun/HP is comparable; hardware support is comparable; I would give a slight edge to HP in software support. I do like Sun's dynamically tuned kernels; HP is finally getting around to that in 11.1x but still at a fairly Mickey Mouse level. One area that HP beats Sun is in patch management. HP's GR's or Quality Packs are much cleaner and easier to install.

Regards, Clay

[Darrell Allen]

Harry, you're right that admintool was available but I found it so weak that I really did prefer command line.

Darrell

[Kevin Wright]

The main advantage I see using HP over sun is LVM for the boot disk. Sun can use SDS or Veritas if you encapsulate the disk..which can lead to other problems if something is wrong with Veritas, the system won't boot. SDS is probably the recommended way to mirror the root disk. LVM, at least the way it is now, is very easy to mirror the root disk and use LVM/Veritas for other disks..basically it's LVM vs SDS.
Sun's Devices can be quite complicated as mentioned earlier, I have yet to find anything close to ioscan, sysdef just doesn't compare.

But like mentioned, sun has advantages in other areas, like /etc/system and networking.

[Martha Mueller]

Kevin,

That's a very good point. That might even be a deciding factor. Thanks for pointing this out.

martha