Hi,
I understand that TeamSite can work on both Windows & Solaris environment, but I'd like to know the pros & cons to them.
Thank you in advance for your feedbacks.
Regards,
Jihan
The pros and cons are largely subjective.
Windows is widely available and widely known but - IMO - a poor sustitute for a "real" OS, lots of quirks
Solaris is now freely available, and with the newer versions of TeamSite, Solaris 10x86 can run on the same hardware that you might have used for Windows, or you can use non-x86 Solaris on more expensive hardware too, though there tends to be less of those around these days.
Linux is also basically freely available and also supported by TeamSite, and can run on the same hardware that you might have used for Windows
If you have the option to choose - personally, I'd recommend either Linux or Solaris x86 over WIndows. But if all your SysAdmins only know WIndows, you're probably better off going that way - even if it is an inferior OS.
You can also push the resource cap a little higher on unix, at least until the platform is converted to 64bit. That'd be a consideration if you're going to have a large number of branches and/or concurrent users.
IMHO, pick your platform based on the runtime environment you are mainly using. If you have a DOS runtime, use Windows, otherwise use Linux.
If everything is brand new, use Linux, but then I am a Unix bigot so take that with a grain of salt.
Also, use virtual machines as much as possible, it will make your life so much easier.
Thank you all for your input. BTW, we did ask Support about virtual environment and they said that it is not recommended as the performance will be slower. Do you have any experience on this?
Thanks.
Our setup involves Redhat 6.5 64 bit and Vmware Esx servers. The content store disk is a RAW device direct connected on SAN trough fibrechannel to gain the maximum disk I/O ,and use SAN infrastructure possibilities.
The search server is installed on a seperate server.
Having teamsite on a virtual server, helps you to be more flexible ,and use the features offered by VMware.
All is managed without a root user ,and we make use of sudo entries.
Installation is done with gui and sudo.
Same for opendeploy installation.
Filesystems are on ext4 (to increase folder depth limitation in ext2 and ext3) ,and LVM.
Replication between Production and Disaster recovery is done using BCV snapshotting (disk replication offered by SAN vendor) ,and LVM import/export capabilities.
Defenitely I prefer linux over Solaris and Windows. Linux is cheaper then Solaris , and Linux is more managable then Windows.
Only downside is authentication. You have to talk LDAP over Active Directory with linux.
jihan wrote: Thank you all for your input. BTW, we did ask Support about virtual environment and they said that it is not recommended as the performance will be slower. Do you have any experience on this?
I'm not so sure about that. If your VM server is beefy, you might never see a difference. Even then, the benefits of virtual machines to disaster recovery and sandboxing very much outweigh the minor performance impact. Not to mention, this approach is typically much cheaper in dollars and time if you already have the virtual infrastructure.
jihan wrote: BTW, we did ask Support about virtual environment and they said that it is not recommended as the performance will be slower. Do you have any experience on this?
BTW, we did ask Support about virtual environment and they said that it is not recommended as the performance will be slower. Do you have any experience on this?
Many years ago, this was the standard response from Support (then Interwoven Support) - with respect to production servers; Since then, the technology for virtual machines has advanced significantly and I would hazzard to say that most customers use virtual machines for both development and production TeamSite servers - for essentially the same reasons that have already been described by @rpoulin and others.
So, unless you're using a "weak" virtual machine - I think you can take that particular advice from Support with the proverbial grain of salt.
I have done probably about 50 implementations, all the latest ones are on VMs and the older ones wish they were on VMs. I would never do another implementation on straight hardware.
Heck more often than not, the runtime environments are VMs as well.
