Currently my master server is an old Sun280R. It's one of our last Sun SPARC servers and its replacement has arrived :( . The replacement though is on x86_64 hardware.
Now from what I have heard Solaris x86 is not as solid as it's sparc counterpart. So that is out of the question. We are also trying to steer away from Solaris because we have started to adopt various versions of Red Hat for our nix systems.
My question is what would be the ideal OS for your master and media servers if you had the choice of the following:
- RHEL4
- RHEL5 (I see all disk based backups in our distant future and I wonder if we would benefit from EXT4?)
- Oracle for RHEL4 "Unbreakable"
- Windows 2003
If your wondering why I threw windows in there we have a very fast growing VMware environment and from what I have heard the 6.5.x backup solution for ESX servers requires the media server be a windows server. It has been recommended to me to try and leave all my master and media servers on the same OS. And that is why I would consider making the master a windows server. A concern with a windows master/media is that 90% of my backups are over Ethernet and from my experience windows servers simply don't compare to Unix in regards to TCP/IP speeds.
My personal preference would be to go with Oracle for RHEL4. Mainly because we have support with Oracle and have experience with it.
If there is some other OS out there that simply blows way all others in regards to performance, reliability and administration in a netbackup environment please let me know.
