There are differences between the Unix platforms and the NT platforms.
I think the Unix platforms are pretty much identical, but someone will
correct
me if I am wrong. I usually only recommend the NT platform if you have a
strong bias towards maintaining an all-NT shop. Many customers have no
other Unix, and find it a hardship to support an additional platform.
Functions that are more advanced on Unix:
Event processing: NT has no ruleset editor, and limited ability to use a
ruleset created on a Unix system and ported over. This has a big effect
on event automation as well as filtering of events at the events display.
Both can forward events to the T/EC.
Support for MLMs: If you are going to use MLMs to offload polling, you need
at least one Unix system to configure them from. There is no smconfig for
NT.
The APM: NT has no Agent Policy Manager. This is the function that uses
one or more MLMs to create status icons for MIB variables in the map, and
maintain their status through SNMP polling.
SNMP Data Collection: The data collection functions on NT are trickier to
use,
and harder to get data out of using the built-in graphing tool. You do have
access
to the SQL database and can retrieve it yourself, however.
Discovery: There are still big differences between the platforms in their
ability
to restrict discovery. On Unix you can exclude by SNMP sysObjectId, which
makes
it very easy to exclude whole classes of devices, especially non-snmp
workstations. To do this on NT, you must enter negative address ranges and
that can be quite a chore if your addressing scheme is not very tidy. The
NT
version is also more dependant on name resolution than the Unix version is.
So for big, messy, unkown networks the Unix platform has the edge.
Remote access: Users must access the NT version via the Netview Client on
NT. Users of the Unix version can just telnet to the server and export
their display
if they have X-emulation software. You cannot telnet to the NT server when
something happens to it, either. Both platforms have the nice new
Universal
Web Client.
Third-party apps: You might check into the requirements of any other apps
you
plan to use. Both Unix and NT integrate nicely with CiscoWorks2000 (on a
separate server), but other apps may expect to run on the Netview server.
Older ones will probably only run on Unix.
Users seem to like the gui on NT. It could be said that it is arranged in a
more
logical fashion than Unix is, at least from an operator point of view. It
has some
nice bells and whistles. Performance on NT is excellent, so it is often
preferred from
a price standpoint.
Hope this helps. Anyone else?
Cordially,
Leslie A. Clark
IBM Global Services - Systems Mgmt & Networking
Detroit
"Lee, Ken (IT)" <ken.lee@lamrc.com>@tkg.com on 11/01/2000 01:22:48 PM
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Can someone tell me the advantage and/or disadvantage of installing NetView
on AIX, Solaris, and NT? I am about to install NetView and I have all
three
platforms but I don't know which one is best. Are there functions that
exist on one platform that does not exist on others?
Thanks
Ken Lee
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