Hi, Well as they say, it takes all kinds:) HP-UX is definitely a different beast and 11i hasn't significantly changed over the years other than hardware support and bug fixes. AIX on the other hand is a bit more bizarre with things like ODM, SMIT, and the command line tools. However, I would point out that AIX 6 is pretty much catchup time for them with Solaris 10. I know the WPAR functionality they got through an acquisition, for example. What's interesting is that Solaris on SPARC, MacOS X on PPC, and AIX on Power all use OpenBoot, but have some interesting differences in what you can do. Watching the bootup sequence from the console on a Power box is somewhat familiar and alien all at the same time. Which I think pretty much describes AIX in general. Google on how to setup a virtual IP on AIX.. different let me tell you;)
Some things to point out, is that even though you can't see everything during the Solaris bootup without supplying the -v option to boot, the contents are saved to /var/adm/messages. The reason Solaris is like this is that customers complained a lot in the past about the verbosity of the boot sequence. So there have been programs in the past at Sun to make the boot sequence.. quiet and faster;) But I know what you mean, I've worked with SunOS, Linux, BSDs, and Tru64 and was use to the seeing all that verbose output. But honestly, unless something is wrong, it's just not important. I would say that until Solaris 10 came onto the scene, IBM didn't spend as much resources on adding functionality to AIX. HP on the other hand is still dealing with the transition to Itanium for its customer base. So most of the focus in that camp has been on migration and hardware support. HP-UX itself has not significantly changed. I remember when Tru64 was brought into HP, they promised to port things like AdvFS and TruCluster. Of course, the reality is that Tru64 had some amazing technology, but it was tied to the Mach kernel and the Alpha architecture. Very hard to port that kind of stuff over to an old-school monolithic kernel as HP-UX. HP gave up and decided instead to offer Symantec Veritas VSF and HA bundled instead. >From a kernel perspective, Solaris has had a long history of being ahead of >the competition. It was interesting going from SunOS, Linux, *BSDs, Digital >Unix (tru64) to Solaris and not having to compile a kernel anymore for >example. And it's a huge plus having stable API's and ABI's to run software >from over 10 years ago on Solaris 10 without a recompile. Can't do that on >most OS's.. even Linux hurts in this area. >From what I've seen in customer shops.. ranging from financial, telcos, >e-commerce, etc.. HP-UX and AIX are in the minority. Many shops have >standardized on one UNIX(Solaris) or UNIX-like(Linux) platform. HP-UX lost a >lot of street cred with the Itanium migration. Shops that have AIX, tend to be >older companies that had or still have mainframes. It's just not a platform >companies think of when starting out these days. And it's always seen as a >huge expense in hardware, software, and most of all people. It's getting more >difficult to find HP-UX or AIX sys admins these days. Linux definitely gets a lot of press and attention. The main drivers are start-ups and of coures acedemic settings where it is used a lot. Unfortunately, the commercial UNIXs lost out on this over the past 6-8 years. But I have seen a lot of startups that use or have switch to Solaris. Oddly, there's not a lot press about that. But you would be surprised how many big name web sites and services are using Solaris today. *-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-* Octave J. Orgeron Solaris Virtualization Architect and Consultant Web: http://unixconsole.blogspot.com E-Mail: unixcons...@yahoo.com *-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-* ----- Original Message ---- From: Anon Y Mous <system5u...@yahoo.com> To: opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org Sent: Sunday, April 12, 2009 9:51:17 PM Subject: [osol-discuss] Solaris vs HP-UX vs AIX Has anybody around here ever used HP-UX or AIX or any other relevant non-BSD, non-Linux UNIX-style operating system before? If so, what do you think are the disadvantages and advantages of these other operating systems vis-a-vis Solaris? I found this interesting link that compares HP-UX to Solaris and seems to argue heavily in favor of Solaris being easier to use: http://loudermilk.org/software/solaris-hpux.html The author claims that there is no easy way to tell how much memory is installed in HP-UX. That's crazy!!! To me this sounds so medieval and so dark ages that I have a hard time believing that there is no HP-UX equivalent to what: prtconf -v | grep Memory | awk '{print $3}' does in Solaris that you could just put in your shell script to extract how much total RAM is available in the system. Can any of the HP-UX admins confirm this? The author of the article said that he had to write a C program to figure out how much memory was installed in his HP-UX machines! The init 5 command also apparently doesn't turn off the machine in HP-UX. I find that kind of strange as well. The only advantage I could find that HP-UX has pver Solaris is that by default it seems to give you more information about what's going on when the computer is booting up (without having to add a "-v" option to the boot loader like Solaris requires) and it saves all that information into log files so that you can see what the boot errors are after the server is done booting up. I don't remember the Solaris "dmesg | less" command ever having any bootup / startup log information in it, so where is this information stored in Solaris? One of the very few things that annoys me about Solaris is that by default (without the "-v" option in the bootloader) it doesn't give you very much information about what is actually going on when the computer is booting up and shutting down compared to Red Hat with it's: Starting this [ OK ] / [ FAILED ] messages. Sure SMF theoretically can start lots of services at the same time which is better than Red Hat's init scripts, but it would still be nice to see more by default about what's actually going on in the Solaris boot process. I also found this article on AIX: http://blog.thilelli.net/post/2007/05/22/Upcoming-IBM-AIX-6-features-vs-Sun-Solaris-10-and-OpenSolaris I haven't played around with AIX yet, but just reading about it, it seems like some kind of a weird, alien land... like UNIX with a New Jersey accent. It's supposed to be a System V, but the init scripts are BSD style instead of SysV /etc/init.d 's ? Can someone confirm this? The seems kind of bizarre as well. Why would you not have Sys V init scripts if it's a Sys V UNIX? Solaris 10 has SMF but it still has a latent backwards compatible Sys V init capability in the /etc/init.d directory if anyone decides that they want to use it. I can't figure out what the advantage is that AIX has over Solaris, even for IBM shops, because Solaris seems like it's capable of running virtualized inside z/VM in an IBM shop's mainframe whereas AIX can't do this. I also didn't mention any of the other non-BSD Unices because I've been doing some research and SGI's IRIX seems like it's are pretty much dead now and Compaq's (DEC's) Tru64 UNIX was decapitated in a duel with HP-UX, which only leaves Solaris, HP-UX and AIX as the remaining three immortals in the System V UNIX "Highlander" competition that seems to be going on in large enterprises for domination of the high availability systems market. Hopefully either Solaris or some kind of BSD will win the tournament and beat out the competition for marketshare as Linux doesn't seem to be all that reliable if you don't roll your own custom-built Linux distro from scratch and run it on carefully chosen hardware the way that Google and Akamai do. When you're stuck with a job as a sysadmin for random x86 based Linux machines purchased by other people with device drivers that are out of the main kernel tree, you never know when a Linux kernel upgrade is going to break something. Remember- in the end... there can be only one! -- This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
