I've spent most of my time running Solaris on Sun equipment. The past 6 months (new job) I've been working with RedHat on intel pc's (as "servers"). Management doesn't want to spend any money. I've got an opportunity to pick up a Sun Enterprise 450 Workgroup server for very cheap money. I would like to use it to replace a pc that has been pressed in to service as a "server" but we are running RedHat on it. I have a copy of Solaris that I could put on the 450 but the apps we have on the "pc server" are running on RedHat now. I don't know if it would be a seamless transition to move them to Solaris. Will RedHat run on a Sun Enterprise 450 server without any special configuration?

Not sure you'll gain much installing RH on the sparc machine.

Linux is certainly less tested on that platform than on intel h/w, and solaris is undoubltly more stable on that box.

Moving your apps to the 450 would probably requires too their recompilation to the sparc architecture, unless they are written in an interpreted language or in java.

What kind of applications do you plan to migrate ?

RedHat will not work on SUN (no more, due RedHat stopped supporting the SPARC architecture).

But other Distros support it, you may have a look at Debian for SPARC.

On the other side, maybe has a new PC more speed then an old and poorly equipped E450 ?

I wouldn't automatically discount an E450 as "poorly equipped". At max capacity, a quad-processor system with 20 internal SCSI drives makes a nice system, especially when storage space is a concern.

The 450 I had at my last employment had 1 GB of RAM and 1 X 450MHz processor and ran a couple instances of Oracle 8.1.6 and a couple more in 8.1.6.3. It also ran Weblogics and ATG Dynamo and Apache (it was our development ecommerce server). The thing was a horse. It never had to come down and was never slow. I've got an opportunity to get an E450 with 4 X 250 MHz processors and 1 GB of RAM for about $600. I often find that people that are only familiar with Intel hardware don't think much of a machine if it isn't in the GHz range for processors but it isn't a 1 to 1 relationship between RISC and Intel architecture.

I don't know if this has the extra two backplanes in it or not yet. Right now it's only got 4 X 9.1 GB drives so probably not. But seeing it so cheap is tempting. The machine I would replace is a homebuilt pc with an ABit mother board that does have RAID (doing RAID1) and has a 1.4 GHz processor. It is our NIS server, NFS server and it runs mySQL and Bugzilla on RedHat 7.3. I didn't build the machine and I guess they had a difficult time getting the drivers to work for the I/O. I'm not looking forward to having to rebuild it if it fails. We recently had a failure here so they are all worried all of a sudden about downtime but they don't want to spend any money. I'm pretty much limited to coat hangers and chewing gum (old 400MHz pc's). To acutally run on reliable hardware again would be so refreshing. Oh well, enough complaining. Thanks for the responses. I have to continue to explore "cheap" options.