Quote:
Originally Posted by ichbindev
How good is FreeBSD as a cluster? Can it work with iSCSI? Say one wants to create a high-availability database cluster with say two nodes (active/passive) using iSCSI? Any reason not to use FreeBSD?
How good is vendor support for FreeBSD on servers (or vice versa)? Say an enterprise buys everything from one of the big ones: Dell, HP, IBM, others. How new (or old) does the hardware have to be for FreeBSD to support things like raid cards, hard drive hot swap, and others?
Another reason I see with FreeBSD in the enterprise is that there are not enough people with knowledge as for Linux. Say someone wants to hire an outside consultant or some in-house person, I think maybe they will have a harder time finding FreeBSD folks than Linux people. From what I have experienced, this issue alone can drive a lot of decisions against FreeBSD.
I am trying to gather as many reasons as possible so that a better picture comes up of where FreeBSD is lagging behind comparable solutions. So far all input is appreciated.
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I do not think that sending a message to a mailing list like this will help you get proper answers to above questions but I will give you my 2c.
I a mathematician so I am not the one whom you want to ask most of above questions anyway. I have been around for a while (read I am old)
so I have seen the stuff.
I think that the answer for first questions is YES. In particular DragonFly
BSD claim to fame is clustering.
FreeBSD has worse support on servers than Linux as it is not usually advertised as vendor supported platform but the support is never the less excellent. BSD license are much more liberal and business friendly than GPL. That should be definitely one thing you want to have in mind.
Various BSDs are usually foundation for high end proprietary solutions.
Many vendors see BSD as a real competition to their proprietary products while they see Linux as something that their customers want.
Please, contact for instance IX Systems and they will hook you up with
FreeBSD server in no time.
Obviously if you are buying high end HP and IBM hardware for couple million dollars they will probably toss you AIX or HP Unix for free.
I would always think twice before running FreeBSD on any IBM PPC hardware or HP itanium processors.
Wintel hardware is different story including RAID. FreeBSD any time any place with FreeBSD.
If you want to run SUN sparc hardware you probably want to use Solaris or if you want DNS, Firewall or similar probably OpenBSD. OpenBSD has the best support for sparc platform of any BSDs with exception of multithreading where Solaris has many advantages over OpenBSD.
I think that people are the greatest FreeBSD asset. In my experience an average FreeBSD power user is real Unix guru with serious academic back ground and many years of experience on proprietary Unix-es. Why is harder to come by such people? You need to pay them more
They might be running your local data center IBMs on AIX. They might be running some high end SGI hardware. How many real Linux experts are there? Not that many if you ask me. They are usually former classmates of FreeBSD gurus.