RedHat on Sun Equipment

[Steve]

On Fri, 18 Jun 2004, Ted Beaton wrote:

> I've spent most of my time running Solaris on Sun equipment.  The past 6
> months I've been working with RedHat on intel pc's (as "servers").  
> Management doesn't want to spend any money.  I've got an opportunity to
> pick up a Sun Enterprise 450 Workgroup server for very cheap money.  I
> would like to use it to replace a pc that has been pressed in to service
> as a "server" but we are running RedHat on it.  I have a copy of Solaris
> that I could put on the 450 but the apps we have on the "pc server" are
> running on RedHat now.  I don't know if it would be a seamless
> transition to move them to Solaris. Will RedHat run on a Sun Enterprise

While you may be able to get a version of linux to run on SPARC 
processors, the machine will be big endian (byte order is reversed from 
that of a PC) and so binaries will not run (not to mention the differences 
in the machine level code)

As a result, transitioning applications to the sun hardware will not be a 
simple task, even were you to run linux on it.

Running linux apps on Solaris will be even more of a job and quite simply 
wont work.

Not to say it wont be able to replace the PC's however, but dont look at 
it as being a simple job unless you are very familiar with both linux and 
solaris and possibly compiling stuff under solaris.

After saying that - it will also depend entirely on the application, you 
may find pre-built binaries for solaris that you can use and do a straight 
swap out..

> 450 server without any special configuration?  Also, does anyone know if
> Sun's Solstice DiskSuite will run on RedHat.  It is a

Nope, the Solstice Disksuite packages are solaris only, redhat has its own 
raid implementation and it is slightly different, tho not that different 
from solstice and wouldnt take you that long to learn.