Newbie to FreeBSD on SPARC - questions about Sun hardware

[Kaya Saman]

Royce Williams wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 11, 2010 at 9:30 AM, Kaya Saman <SamanKaya at netscape.net> wrote:
>
>   
>> is this list online or dead?
>>
>> Sorry am just not used to a mailing list being this quiet! Usually within a
>> few minutes or hours of signing up someone has posted something to the list
>> (not meaning response to what I ask but just in a generic sense).
>>     
>
> I'm mostly a lurker on this list, but I'd say that the silence was
> because your message had multiple sections, and some of the questions
> were non-trivial to answer. :-)
>
> Your summary was helpful:
>
> [...]
>
> .. but you also said that you were interested in the difference
> between SPARC and x86. There are many, many variables underneath the
> answer to these questions.  Also, "performance" means different things
> to different people.  I don't know of any broad, publiished benchmarks
> comparing freebsd/sparc64 and freebsd/i386 performance, but they would
> be interesting to see.
>
> Maybe someone else on the list is in a similar boat, and will chime in
> here. :-)  In my experience, unless you can find others who are
> already working under similar requirements, the clueful advice I've
> seen people give is that doing your own testing is the best way to get
> results that are meaningful to your situation.
>
> Royce
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>   
Many thanks for the response Royce! :-)

Actually I am not that much interested in the performance benefits 
between x86 and SPARC; but more between OpenSolaris and FreeBSD on SPARC 
as I will be running either one on a Sun V480 server.

The issue I am facing is purely down to software and administration. I 
mean the best example I can provide is that BSD has the packages I want 
at least for x86 which I've seen: that are Cacti, Munin, and awstats 
(should also be there for SPARC too) but then Solaris has zones which 
allow me to allocate a separate virtualized OS contained within the 
master OS or global zone. BSD on the other hand has jails and as from 
going onto the jails list apparently I can actually assign interfaces to 
various jails which is what I was going to do if I used Solaris Zones.

So that's really what my issue is: which OS to choose??

Adding to what I mentioned about Cacti, Munin etc.... Solaris has a 
secondary site called opencsw which you can download most of the stuff 
bar Cacti. This just makes thing tricky I feel to install and configure 
since one can do a /usr/ports/*/cacti then make install clean which will 
do everything on FreeBSD.

Hmm..... decisions, decisions......

Regards,

Kaya