Has any one done any work on comparing Solaris and NT as a platform for NNM? I'm looking for some justification of choosing a Solaris platform. My own experience is that it is faster on Solaris and possibly less buggy. It would be nice to find some corroborating evidence!
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gethostbyaddr() on windows waits for WINS resolution timeout even when you disable WINS on the server.
This means that your DNS server may return "No hostname found" and windows gethostbyaddr() will just sit there, never having asked a WINS server anything, for 3 - 4 seconds. I watched it do just that with a sniffer.
Windows:
1. No way to get true remote console other than network KVM (very expensive)
2. gethostbyaddr() sucks
3. Remote desktop license restrictive (2 or 3 TS sessions only)
4. performance degrades faster over time due to NTFS fragmentation
5. Shorter uptimes, cannot run minimalist system to secure your software environment.
6. Must run cygwin or buy other ssh server to get ssh access
7. Just sucks
I havent really run NNM on windows/NT/2K only on unix(solaris) so I cant really make that much comparison or give a true judgement on NT vs Unix but you can go to the www.ovforum.org where there have been quite a bit of discussion about this on people who have run it on both platforms. But I believe NNM on unix platform can certainly handle more nodes/objects and on unix you can aid the NNM processes properly by tuning the Unix kernel. I think if youre in a very large enterprise or ISP Unix platform will be more ideal.
Well we run NNM on Solaris here too and it's very reliable, fast etc but the rest of our shop is almost pure Windows2K. One of the drawbacks of the Solaris platform is the inability to do lots of scripted actions (usually as responses to alarms) using all of the new (and even somewhat cool) WMI and ADSI calls. How do you reboot a Windows machine, or restart IIS, or look at an Active Directory property from your Solaris management server? Hmmmm, I'm sure it can be done...but each of those are scripts I can write and implement in about 2 minutes if the management box was Windows.
I think there are three reasons to seriously consider NNM on Windows:
1) small shop (not too many nodes)
2) homogenous Windows shop
3) unfamiliarity of administrator (and his backup!)with Unix
We use ITO/OVO here so it's easier. The OVO management server can run the action on any (Windows) box with an OVO agent. But OVO is really expensive (just for the maintenance!) and we're considering removing it. If we do, I will seriously consider migrating NNM to Windows.
Thought I would step into the fray as well. I run a large environment with a HPUX 11 MS and win2k collectors. I find HPUX to be very stable and reliable, and the collectors do their job well. We use windows terminal services to manage the individual collectors, it is much cheaper and convenient than a hardware (KVM) solution.
regards,
Richard
NNM on Unix can manage more nodes. This is because ICMP polls all use the same queue & the number of outstanding polls is much smaller on NT than it is under Unix (3 vs 20 IIRC).
System Security can be a major concern if the web tools are needed: IIS is a nightmare. Of course, it can be replaced with Apache on NT as well if you're willing to abandon HP's support (apache not supported on NT).
Serious Scripting: NT will slow you down waaaaay more than Unix does if you need to exec complex scripts on trap reception. NNM fork+execs scripts on on automatic actions & NT does NOT handle this well when used to a non-trivial extent. Use of .bats implies little cmd.exe windows popping up & stealing focus from the foreground app (use of .exes or perl recommended in this case)
NNM's security model is Unix based (& undocumented on NT). How do you protect Map A from user B on NT again? Will HP support it if it breaks?
X is a major advantage to NNM on Unix: Multiple consoles without the hassle of remote consoles (which use fileshares on NT with all the joy that entails -- Why can't it mount the fileshare, it Pings the server but netbios refuses to see it, etc), or the limits on web consoles.
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