On 3/18/2011 3:15 PM, Garrett D'Amore wrote:
a) Nexenta Core Platform is a bare-bones OS. No GUI, in other words (no X11.) It might well suit you.
Indeed :), my servers are headless (well, as headless as you can get on x86 hardware 8-/, they do have an ipmi remote console that still needs to be used occasionally <sigh>) and I generally install a minimal set of packages. We have the X client libraries installed on some of our linux servers, as our DBA's like to run the gui oracle installer, but I don't recall ever needing to run X software on our storage servers. One of my many spats with Oracle technical support (the database side, not the operating system side) was trying to get them to justify why the "xscreensaver" package was listed as a core dependency of running 10g under RHEL 5 :(. Never did get an answer to that, they just closed the ticket out from under me...
c) NCP 4 is still 5-6 months away. We're still developing it.
By the time I do some initial evaluation, then some prototyping, I don't anticipate migrating anything production wise until at the earliest Christmas break, so that timing shouldn't be a problem. Any thoughts on how soon a beta might be available? As it sounds like there will be significant changes, it might be better to evaluate with a beta of the new stuff rather than the production version of the older stuff. Plus I generally tend to break things in unexpected ways ;), so doing that in the beta cycle might be beneficial.
d) NCP 4 will make much more use of the illumos userland, and only use Debian when illumos doesn't have an equivalent.
Given both NCP and OpenIndiana will be based off of illumos, and as of version 4 NCP will be migrating as much as possible of the userland to solaris as opposed to gnu, other than the differing packaging formats what do you feel will distinguish NCP from openindiana? NCP is positioned as a bare-bones server, whereas openindiana is trying to be more general purpose including desktop use?
e) NCP comes entirely unsupported. NexentaStor is a commercial product with real support behind it, though.
Can you treat NexentaStor like a general purpose operating system, not use the management gui, and configure everything from a shell prompt, or is it more appliance like and you're locked out from the OS? In other words, would it be possible (although not necessarily cost-effective) to pay for NexentaStor for the support but treat it like NCP? Has your company considered basic support contracts for NCP? I've heard from at least one other site that might be interested in something like that. We don't need much in the way of handholding, the majority of our support calls end up being actual bugs or limitations in solaris. But if one of our file servers panics, doesn't import a pool when it boots, and crashes every time you try to import it by hand, it would be nice to have an engineer available :). Thanks... -- Paul B. Henson | (909) 979-6361 | http://www.csupomona.edu/~henson/ Operating Systems and Network Analyst | hen...@csupomona.edu California State Polytechnic University | Pomona CA 91768 _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
