Newbie to FreeBSD on SPARC - questions about Sun hardware

[Kaya Saman]

Many thanks guys,

I will respond with a prominent reply hopefully within a few hours if 
not then at around ~17:00 EET time as I have some work to do in the 
office allocated to me right now. :-)

Best regards,

Kaya

Gavin Atkinson wrote:
> On Mon, 11 Jan 2010, Kaya Saman wrote:
>   
>> 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.
>>     
>
> It's quite hard to say with any certainty.  I'd personally say that on my 
> old Ultra 5, Solaris is a little faster, especially for IDE disk access.  
> On my V480, I can't tell any difference in speed between FreeBSD and 
> Solaris.  However, it's probably very dependent on the exact workload: 
> something entirely CPU bound or I/O bound probably won't be any faster or 
> slower whatever the OS is.
>
>   
>> 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.
>>     
>
> Briefly (and again, personal opinion):
>
> Solaris Zones win over FreeBSD Jails (but if you're not using the extra 
> features like resource limiting then there's probably no real difference).
>
> Solaris hardware monitoring (failed PSU, etc) wins over FreeBSD (I'm not 
> sure if FreeBSD supports any "fan failed" type stuff)
>
> FreeBSD ports win over OpenCSW or Blastwave, by a *long* way.
>
> FreeBSD community wins over Solaris community (I've had a lot of 
> experience with both!).
>
> At the end of the day, Solaris is always going to win on the level of 
> hardware support, but from a day to day management point of view I'd say 
> FreeBSD and it's ports win hands down.
>
> Gavin
>