On Fri, Sep 30, 2005 at 11:45:12AM -0500, Charles Ballowe wrote:
> A case for a windows master in an environment that is primarily
> windows and has a well structured domain/AD environment would be the
> ability to push clients. If your environment is primarily unix, that
> case fails. Unfortunately, that's not much of a case -- the throughput
> and reliability of unix servers really does outweigh the small
> benefits of being able to push clients, not to mention scripting and
> reporting capabilities.

We push Unix clients all the time.  And updating Unix clients is much
easier than updating a Windows client.

The one driving factor we see (and we did a migration from a Windows
master server to a Unix server) is the manageability and stability of
the master server.  It's far easier to write scripts to do stuff on Unix
than it is on Windows.

In terms of stability, you can expect that if you have tape drive
issues, you'll end up rebooting all of your Windows media servers.  With
a Unix media server, you can add and update tape drive configurations
(e.g. when a tape drive is replaced) without reboots.

Although we have far more Windows servers than Unix servers around here,
our NetBackup infrastructure is primarily Unix (Solaris on the master
server, Solaris on a media server, plus Windows 2003 on a media server).

        .../Ed

-- 
Ed Wilts, Mounds View, MN, USA
mailto:ewilts AT ewilts DOT org