Apple's New Flagship: Wow, That's a Lot of Power!

[-Job-]

I'll settle for a Solaris VM to host J2EE apps under Websphere. My current "server" is overheating as it is.

 

[graphic7]

I'll settle for a Solaris VM to host J2EE apps under Websphere. My current "server" is overheating as it is.

You shouldn't have any problem running Solaris 10 or Nevada in VMware; however, I can't guarantee what level of performance you'll receive. As for your current server overheating, I'd make sure you have your fans placed properly throughout the chassis. I have a peecee that tends to run anywhere between 50-60C, but my E4500 rarely gets above 40C (anything about 50C on an E4500 is considered dangerous). This is because the E4500 has its fans placed properly, but its also placed properly in the room, so that air can be sucked in from the right, blown over the CPU heatsinks and memory DIMMs, and then blown out the left side of the chassis.

 

[FulhamFan3]

As a comparison i just purchased a server with two 2.66Ghz quad core CPUs with a 1333Ghz FSB, 8Gb FB RAM and a 15 RPM 150Gb RAID 1 drive configuration and it's considerably less than half of the $12,000 for the Mac Pro. (minimal graphics card though)

Where are you getting that price from? I just went to the apple website and put the same specs as you and it comes up with $5,700.

 

[-Job-]

Someone else in the thread mentioned $12,000. I guess i just took their word for it.

 

[-Job-]

You shouldn't have any problem running Solaris 10 or Nevada in VMware; however, I can't guarantee what level of performance you'll receive. As for your current server overheating, I'd make sure you have your fans placed properly throughout the chassis. I have a peecee that tends to run anywhere between 50-60C, but my E4500 rarely gets above 40C (anything about 50C on an E4500 is considered dangerous). This is because the E4500 has its fans placed properly, but its also placed properly in the room, so that air can be sucked in from the right, blown over the CPU heatsinks and memory DIMMs, and then blown out the left side of the chassis.

I'm having some issues configuring the shorewall firewall in my Solaris installation. I think the Solaris 10 version i installed, which i got a while back, is a desktop version. I don't see the point of having Solaris as anything else other than a server to be honest.

 

[aliaze1]

For my purposes, the Sun Ultra 40 workstation is more suited. I would consider Apple's spec'd out Mac Pro not to be a bad system, but its still not a UNIX workstation, and Apple is not a UNIX vendor. The Ultra 40 seems to be far more expandable (up to 8 internal disks) and Sun is offering some fairly high-end workstation-class level graphics with it (note workstation-class, not PC game workloads, which are texture intensive rather than programmed IO). On top of that, you get HyperTransport, as its AMD-based.

So, if you're in the market for a decent UNIX workstation, rather than a graphics workstation, you might take a look Sun's Ultra 20 and Ultra 40 AMD64 workstations.

http://www.sun.com/desktop/workstation/ultra40/

Mac OS X is UNIX based, so perhaps a knowledgeable person could tweak the MAC Pro to run UNIX?

 

[Aquafire]

Mac OS X is UNIX based, so perhaps a knowledgeable person could tweak the MAC Pro to run UNIX?

Dead easy.

Aquafire.

 

[las3rjock]

Dead easy.

Agreed, especially since the Open Group has already certified Mac OS X Version 10.5 ("Leopard") as meeting the UNIX 03 standard. The other UNIX 03 certified operating systems are Solaris 10, HP-UX 11i V3, and AIX 5L.

 

[Aquafire]

Agreed, especially since the Open Group has already certified Mac OS X Version 10.5 ("Leopard") as meeting the UNIX 03 standard. The other UNIX 03 certified operating systems are Solaris 10, HP-UX 11i V3, and AIX 5L.

Speaking of which...

For a while there, Sun was offering free copies of its Solaris 10 system.

This link might still work...

http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/solaris-express/get.jsp

I installed it onto an older x86 machine of mine...

Not bad...considering..

( who said there's no such thing as a free lunch ? )

Aquafire

 

[aliaze1]

There is no way that two AMD 2.6GHz Opteron cores can even get close to the processing power of eight Intel 3.0GHz Xeon cores.

lol!