Which OS?

[BoneBaby]

I work IT within an organization that is rather disjointed. (Doesn't everyone?) Anyway, this group across the way decided that they needed a new "HotRod" system to run some models on. They went out and got a Sun W2100z worstation. It's got 2 Opteron 252s & 16 GB of RAM. It's sitting here in my office, a sharp looking box.

What OS would leverage this beast's power best? The problem, Their apps are win based... It's gotta run W2K, XP, or if I can get my hands on it 2003. I don't think I can get a Win64 OS through the security folks... That and I have no idea if their apps would run under a 64bit OS.

They are currently running W2K Workstation on an HP Wx6000 2 x Xeon 2.8s, and expect this new purple monster to run circles around it.

Suggestions?

 

[Dahak]

Seeing as it has 16gb of ram, the only windows versions that will use that are windows xp pro x64 or windows 2003 server x64 edition. the other possiblility could be some flavor of linux

*edit* 32bit apps will run fine on them.

 

[BoneBaby]

Pretty much what I was thinking, just don't want to have to go that route. I'm going to try booting with the /PAE switch in the boot.ini on W2K server and pray that their apps use AWE memory functions. Will be interesting in any case

 

[Nothinman]

Did anyone tell them that getting a 64-bit processor won't help their 32-bit apps use more than 4G of VM?

And didn't the thing come with an OS already?

 

[bsobel]

Originally posted by: Nothinman
Did anyone tell them that getting a 64-bit processor won't help their 32-bit apps use more than 4G of VM?

And didn't the thing come with an OS already?

Thats still 1 to 2 gig more than on 32bit windows...

 

[BoneBaby]

It kinda just appeared the other day, that was the first time I saw it... Sooo... Apparently not much consultation was going on

And yes, it came with Solaris 10 for x86 on dvd, with Java desktop preloaded. Doesn't really help the fact that they want it to run windows though.

I'm going to have to wear my boots tomorrow...

 

[drag]

The only real choices are AMD64 Linux and AMD64 Windows, realy.

If the apps your using are made in house then some extra development should have them working in 64bit mode, I suppose. Same thing with Linux.. with Wine you could recompile the programs to be 64bit-native, I beleive and since your compiling for wine, instead of using wine to try to run apps compiled for Windows I think that they would have a much better chance of working and all that.

Still though, 64bit Windows server version would probably end up being easier. Didn't they know that they could of ordered the machine from Sun with windows? (I beleive that's possible.) At least then, even with just 32 bit programs you could be sure get the maximum amount of RAM ram for each individual 32bit app your running.

 

[Nothinman]

Thats still 1 to 2 gig more than on 32bit windows...

But IIRC it also requires the large memory aware flag in the executable which not many binaries have.

 

[Fresh Daemon]

I think before you start thinking about OSes you should think about your application software. People don't just wake up one morning and go buy a multi-thousand-dollar "2 Opteron 252s & 16 GB of RAM" workstation (or at least, they shouldn't), they buy it to fulfill a specific need. So, what's that need? Rendering? SQL server? Development platform? Once you figure out your need, find the best software to fulfill it, and then run the OS that will best allow you to run that software.

If the apps are Windows-based then you're probably stuck with Windows. Emulating is not going to do anything for performance. Are they 64-bit compatible? If so, you could consider XP 64-bit, otherwise, it's back to win32 and you waste all that RAM. Are there good alternative products for Linux, *BSD or Solaris? If there are, are you prepared to retrain for them?

Sounds like your IT procurement department has money to burn. Disorganization, wasting money, lack of communication - how long will your employer last? Time to polish your resume?

 

[Matthias99]

Originally posted by: Fresh Daemon
I think before you start thinking about OSes you should think about your application software. People don't just wake up one morning and go buy a multi-thousand-dollar "2 Opteron 252s & 16 GB of RAM" workstation (or at least, they shouldn't), they buy it to fulfill a specific need. So, what's that need? Rendering? SQL server? Development platform? Once you figure out your need, find the best software to fulfill it, and then run the OS that will best allow you to run that software.

If the apps are Windows-based then you're probably stuck with Windows. Emulating is not going to do anything for performance. Are they 64-bit compatible? If so, you could consider XP 64-bit, otherwise, it's back to win32 and you waste all that RAM.

If your applications support PAE, and you run the right versions of Windows (as referenced above, WinXP 64-bit or various flavors of Windows Server), they can access more than the 2-3GB of RAM normally allowed for a single process. This is actually pretty common for 'workstation' type programs, and many server-side programs (database or web servers, etc.)

However, as mentioned, this is something they should have known BEFORE they ordered a $5K+ (maybe $10K+, given their prices) SUN workstation. If you're running a single 32-bit singlethreaded Windows app that doesn't support PAE, then you bought the *wrong* system. If you have a multithreaded app that either has a 64-bit version or supports PAE (and will actually need 4+GB of RAM with your workloads), the system should be ridiculously fast.