Migrated from Solaris to Linux - Success?
Has anyone here in recent years migrated key servers from Solaris to Red Hat (or any Linux distro)? If so, what did you think about the move? Did it go well? Do you miss Solaris?
Well, after kicking and screaming for years, I made the decision to migrate our key Solaris 10 x86 web & mySQL servers to RHEL 5.6. Mainly because Egenera Bladeframes played less and less "nice" with Solaris 10. It took FOREVER for Solaris to boot or reboot on Egenera, if it would at all, and it was always patch-dependent based off of Egenera-provided drivers (virtualized extensions). It took hours to install Solaris in recent years. It was also like walking on pins-and-needles when patching Solaris kernels in fear of breaking the host on the pServers (processing servers). I rather run Solaris on Sparc or Sun/Oracle provided x86 hardware.
After using Sun/Solaris OS for 15 years, moving to RHEL 5.6 has been a complete joy, with the exception of volume and file system management. I do miss my ZFS!!!! I guess LVM will do for now - I'm still getting use to it. Not sure I could pass a cert test on that yet.
I like things in RHEL like yum, nmon (extra), all the updated Open Source tools, like tar, awk(gawk), top, nmap, etc, etc. The RHEL documentation, so far, has been a joy to find procedures. A two-day Solaris-to-RHEL class helped too. I really like the fact that I don't have to get OpenCSW/Blastwave software to get some updated tools on my OS (solaris). Compiling extra software has been a piece of cake on Linux... so far.
I also REALLY like the fact that the Linux servers can boot in less than a minute (especially with unneeded services turned off. The "out-of-the-box" security settings are nice too. In these times, security should have to be "loosened" not tightened up. I know Solaris 11 will address many of these issues, but for our shop, and from what I've heard, many other IT shops, it's just too little, WAY too late.
Not to mention Oracle f##king up large orders of hardware and communicating LITTLE with the customer base. Oh well, it happened, it's over!
I'll have to learn some real SAN commands in RHEL as VMs and Egenera is doing all that work for me so far.
Anyways, I just wanted to hear about any REAL, non-marketing, success stories to possibly learn of any "gotchas" before I run into them in production. We're not doing "cloud stuff" or clusters (yet), but various MySQL databases with LAMP setups. Currently we're a big Apache, Perl shop, with a plan to be more Java-based in the future. Our Java developer is moving towards Glass Fish. I don't do much with that as I'm an sys-admin. In the very near future, we'll be moving some RHELs into Cisco UCS with (and without) VMware. As soon as we can figure out why our first UCS will not play nice with our Sun StorageTek 6540 RAID. Ah, the chore-list grows.
Thanks for reading this rant. I hope to learn from all you great Linux gurus.
Sincerely,
"Learning to like Linux.... quickly!" - bits45
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