Sun Solaris sysadmin from a HP-UX admins point of view

[James Beamish-White]

Hi all,

I have been given the wonderful privilege of presenting to my team (HP-UX sysadmins) the main differences between Solaris and HP-UX. I would like to know if anyone knows of some documents/URLs for this, so I don't have to reinvent the wheel - I know Solaris very well, but documenting my knowledge would be both time consuming and pointless if it's been done before.

Thanks in advance,
James

[James R. Ferguson]

Hi James:

Here's one useful summary:

http://www.unixguide.net/unixguide.shtml

Regards!

...JRF...

[Bernie Vande Griend]

Here's another one that's similar but a bit different:

http://home.earthlink.net/~bhami/rosetta.html

[Stefan Farrelly]

One of the recent Sysadmin issues was all on Solaris administration;

http://www.sysadminmag.com/articles/2001/0110/

[Bernie Vande Griend]

One more site, that has a lot of good information about many different OS's, I especially like the summaries:

http://www.osdata.com/

[linuxfan]

Hi James,

A quick guide for differences between HP-UX and Solaris

http://www.hp.com/technicalsolutions/eda/hp-ux11_solaris/reference_guide.html

This is a link for HP- SOlaris directory mapping.

http://www.hp.com/technicalsolutions/eda/hp-ux11_solaris/dir_mappings.html


Another user link which gives a good comparision is

http://www.osdata.com/oses/hpux.htm
http://www.osdata.com/oses/solaris.htm

Not sure if you are looking for differences from a programmers point of view. But the link to porting from solaris to HP might be useful

http://h21007.www2.hp.com/dspp/tech/tech_TechDocumentDetailPage_IDX/1,1701,1775!4!13,00.html

-HTH
Ramesh

[harry d brown jr]

The biggest difference is the lack of lvm management on solaris unless you purchase veritas, as where HP has it built in. One thing that will kill the HP admins is that they will have to learn how to use the real command "df", unless you create them a script on solaris to do a "bdf". Oh yeah, don't forget the command "ll" that they have gotten used to. The patch management is different, but not that difficult to use. Shutting down/rebooting a system is a little different, but again, no big deal. It'll be good for them to learn solaris. I'd recommend the SUN FASTTRACK class. It's a week long, but it is good, especially for experienced unix admins!

[Carol Balla]

Harry:
I'm getting the impression that it isn't that big of a deal to go from HP-UX to Sun (from admin point of view). I will check links for details but is that what your saying?
Carol

[Victor_5 · Accepted solution]

try this web site:

http://www.uni-karlsruhe.de/Uni/RZ/Betriebssysteme/HP-UX/doc/interworks/Tech/sun_hpux_interop/outline.html

Shawn

[Stefan Farrelly]

I hope youre going to assign points to all those who took their time to help you.

[Bill McNAMARA_1]

Negative experiences follow.. sorry I've turned my back on sun after seeing hp-ux..

Every major vendor submits tpc benchmarks but now Sun is refusing with the Sun Fire.
http://www.tpc.org/
Why?

Sun recently admitted to chip flaw and reduced spec results

Oracle, a large partner of both Sun and HP, went public earlier this year that they have switched their most mission-critical systems from Sun to HP because of higher levels of server reliability

CPU boards come with 2 or 4 CPUs. CPUs cannot be added to existing boards so you need to swap boards. High density 4GB DIMMs not available so max memory is 32GB in 3800, 48GB in 4800, and 96GB in 6800. The CPU/memory boards have 8 memory banks (4 DIMMs (1 or 2GB each): 2 for each processor). Memory can only be installed in combination with the associated processor as the CPU also contains the memory controller. Therefore, a 2 CPU 3800 can currently only support 8GB of memory vs. 32GB on N4000. If a processor fails, so does the associated memory!

Suns single point of failure (SPOF) definition: ???Automatic System Recovery enables sun server systems to reboot immediately following a failure, automatically configuring around a failed component. This approach prevents faulty hardware from keeping the entire system down or causing the system to fail repeatedly.??? Or, ???specific types of hardware failures, such as processor failure, may bring a system down???.

Sorry to be so negative about Sun, I've had some bad administration experiences... although I'm sure some people love it..

The only good thing I have to say about them is:
The boxes look good and
the logo is nice.

Later,
Bill

[Animesh Chakraborty]

Hi,
All the link are very usefull.
10 points to you all from my side.


Thanks
Animesh

[Stefan Farrelly]

Bill - nice long reply on Sun, very interesting. So Oracle makes 3 huge companies switching from Sun to HP recently, ebay and amazon, all for the same reason - reliability, and that HP has ServiceGuard and Sun doesnt. Now, if we could only get ebay and Oracle to show the same little "Powered by HP" logo on their websites as amazon does.....

Cheers,

Stef

[James Beamish-White]

Thanks for all the help guys! Much appreciated.

James

[harry d brown jr]

Carol,

I don't think it's a big deal to go from hpux to solaris. We are a 92-95% HPux shop with about two dozen solaris boxes. Two years ago we only had two sun boxes. Some of our admins were/are reluctant to learn something different, but then again these are the same people that complain about 11i and VirtualPartitions. There is nothing mind boggling about solaris, and actually it???s a lot like hpux 9.04, because you still ???slice??? disks. The biggest thing in solaris is the lack of LVM, unless you purchase veritas.

The best thing, which I did, was to take the week long (6 days) Sun FastTrack class. It???s expensive, but it includes your hotel room, meals, and some other things.

Live free or die

hdb