I mostly run RHEL3 and Solaris 8 servers at work (large university), and although we're trying to get away from sparc/sol8, there's some legacy apps that just require it. I do like FreeBSD, but I can see how it might be close to impossible to get a binary install for it (unless you make the installer tell the admin to install the JDK first and THEN proceed). Porting between Solaris x86 and Solaris Sparc should be fairly trivial as the OS isn't really that different -- some kernel processor calls are different and x86 doesn't have the OpenBoot firmware -- but structurally, they're pretty close to identical from a sysadmin POV. As long as your install doesn't do weird "check if uname returns x86 || fail" checks for no reason, there really shouldn't be a big difference that I know of. _that said_, it looks like I'll have to install Zimbra on a RHEL server instead of the Solaris server I was planning on doing it on; not a deal breaker for me, but I would encourage your dev team to strongly consider buying a cheap sparc or three off ebay or something (sunfire v100's go cheap, ditto workstations like the ultra60*) because a lot of companies are so heavily invested in Sparc hardware that it would be a good idea.
*worth noting that the free solaris OS downloads don't support multi-proc (except I think sol10, which does dual proc -- for multi proc OS capabilities, you'll want to buy a copy of the OS)  |