How we did it

We tested Solaris 10 final, downloaded from the SunStore site. We installed it on nine different platforms: Sun SunFire V20z (two 2.5GHz AMD64 Opteron CPUs; Polywell 2200S (two 2.5GHz AMD64 CPUs; HP DL360-G2 (two 3.06-GHz Xeon CPUs), HP DL580-G3 (four 2.5-GHz Xeon CPUs), NetFrame 1600 (two 3-GHz Xeon CPUs), Dell PowerEdge 1850 (one 3-GHz Xeon CPU), Compaq DL-380 (two 733-MHz Pentium IV CPUs), and a 'whitebox' server (one 2.6-GHz AMD 64 CPU).

We tested Solaris 10 on a network consisting of a Gigabit Ethernet switched backbone and checked logon compatibility with the following server operating systems: Windows 2003 Enterprise Edition, Apple OpenDarwin OS/X 10.3, Red Hat Linux Enterprise 3.0, RedHat Enterprise Linux 4 Advanced Server, NetWare 6.5, NetBSD 1.6.0, and Windows NT Server 4.0. We tested for client logon compatibility with Apple OS/X clients, Windows XP/2000/98SE clients and Linux clients running Mandrake 9, Xandros 3, and Debian Sarge.

We used Spirent Communications' WebAvalanche benchmarks. The results are an average of five test cycles that are within a 5% margin of error. We ran tests of transactions per second, the maximum number of TCP connections per second and the maximum number of open TCP connections per second. We ran Solaris 10 in 64-bit mode on both Sun SunFire V20z and the Polywell 2200S. We also tested in 32-bit mode.

Back to Clear Choice Test: "Solaris 10 heads for Linux territory"