Questions about Windows server, SQL and Unix

[ibex333]

1) I want to learn Unix at some point but I dont see it freely available on the internet like Linux is... What gives? How can I obtain a copy of Unix OS? How much does it generally cost?
Yes, I did a google search but I cannot find any concrete info.

2)Looking at some Server Admin jobs on DICE, I see employers constantly asking for BOTH SQL Server knowledge and Server 2008/Active directory AND Linux/Unix knowledge.
Are these people insane? Don't they understand that SQL and Windows/Lnux server are completely different areas and require going to school for completely different fields? I am currently studying for MCTS certificate, and having taken a beginning SQL class I dont see any similarities between these fields at all. How is it that so many people feel that they go hand in hand?

Maybe it is I that doesn't understand anything, and SQL is in fact somehow intertwined with Windows server? Can someone explain? Currently I only know Windows Server 2008 and only half decently at that. Starting to learn SQL right now, would be kind of crazy... or would it?

3)If I want to start learning Linux/Unix server administration and deployment, is it viable to do it in vmware or do I have to build a separate machine?

 

[Dahak]

1) I do not believe that Unix itself is free, you would have to look at vendor specific ones.

2) the reason why they probably list it that way is they could have a mixed mode environment of both windows servers and linux server. SQL servers probably run on the windows servers hence the need for that. linux servers are probably back end servers for web or similar
And they would want to hire 1 person vs 2 or 3

4) you could do it from vmware or similar if you machine is more than capable, which if its the one in the sig you can do so. some times its nice to do it on a physical machine too. But the bonus of vm you can create snapshots to easily revert back before a change

 

[BurnItDwn]

There really isn't 1 "unix" ...
These days there are several options. For something to be called Unix, it needs to meet the SUS and get certified.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_UNIX_Specification

As far as free distrubutions... FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD are essentially Unix, however, they aren't stamped with the Unix Trademark, so they can only claim to be "unix like" ....
(not worth the $$$ to get certified)

At work, I usually work with Solaris and AIX on big servers, and then Linux on our smaller servers.. (Suse)

At home, I tend to prefer Slackware and OpenBSD.... Slackware is in my experience, the most BSDlike linux distro I've seen, with BSD style init and install .... please note, there's some pretty substantial differences between different vintages and flavors of Unix ....

That said ... FreeBSD is probably the most popular of the BSD based variants...

 

[Nothinman]

1) I want to learn Unix at some point but I dont see it freely available on the internet like Linux is... What gives? How can I obtain a copy of Unix OS? How much does it generally cost?
Yes, I did a google search but I cannot find any concrete info.

Because there is no such thing. You need HP-UX, Solaris, Tru64, etc and none of them are free and usually only come with hardware from the vendor. Except for Solaris, but I'm not sure about it now that Oracle owns it.

RedHat is probably the most common commercial Linux but you can't easily get it for free so you need to use CentOS or Scientfic Linux as they're built from the same source and packages as RHEL

2)Looking at some Server Admin jobs on DICE, I see employers constantly asking for BOTH SQL Server knowledge and Server 2008/Active directory AND Linux/Unix knowledge.
Are these people insane? Don't they understand that SQL and Windows/Lnux server are completely different areas and require going to school for completely different fields? I am currently studying for MCTS certificate, and having taken a beginning SQL class I dont see any similarities between these fields at all. How is it that so many people feel that they go hand in hand?

I don't see the issue there. If you have MS SQL experience you should have some Windows and if you've done admin work on Windows you should have AD experience too. Unix/Linux is separate, but there's a lot of heterogeneous environments out there so it's not hard to get experience with all of that.

3)If I want to start learning Linux/Unix server administration and deployment, is it viable to do it in vmware or do I have to build a separate machine?

Doing it in VMware is fine, however I would say to not tackle that until you're comfortable with Windows. They are very different environments and you'll likely just end up confusing and frustrating yourself if you try to learn both from scratch at the same time.

 

[heymrdj]

Because there is no such thing. You need HP-UX, Solaris, Tru64, etc and none of them are free and usually only come with hardware from the vendor. Except for Solaris, but I'm not sure about it now that Oracle owns it.

RedHat is probably the most common commercial Linux but you can't easily get it for free so you need to use CentOS or Scientfic Linux as they're built from the same source and packages as RHEL



I don't see the issue there. If you have MS SQL experience you should have some Windows and if you've done admin work on Windows you should have AD experience too. Unix/Linux is separate, but there's a lot of heterogeneous environments out there so it's not hard to get experience with all of that.



Doing it in VMware is fine, however I would say to not tackle that until you're comfortable with Windows. They are very different environments and you'll likely just end up confusing and frustrating yourself if you try to learn both from scratch at the same time.

You would think that, but these days businesses have forgotten all about training employees. Now they just steal the top 10 employees back and forth that have already been trained in everything and tell the new comers to the field to pound sand because they don't have the experience for the job.