# is FreeBSD suitable for Enterprise servers?



## ashkanra (Jan 28, 2012)

Hi all,

I'm a Linux developer and sys admin about 3 years. Now I want to do some stuff with BSD (especially FreeBSD). My friends (they are also Linux admins like me) believe BSD is not suitable for enterprise solution, like clustering and data centers, and redhat (centos) is best for these kind of projects.

Personally I think they are wrong and freebsd FreeBSD can handle them.

What do you think about this? FreeBSD is good only for web servers or not?


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## da1 (Jan 28, 2012)

ashkanra said:
			
		

> like clustering and data centers



Exactly what do you need to cluster? Because it's not the OS that you cluster but a service (http, smtp, imap, etc). We have over 100 FreeBSD machines in our datacenter (some running apache, some imagemagic/graphicsmagic, failover pf firewall, mail servers, a SAN and some other nodes).

I think that the best thing would be to pin point an exact suspected problem and try to find a solution for it.

Generally speaking, one can make use of HAST/ZFS/(u)carp to build a so called cluster.

On the side note, I consider RedHell crap compared to HACMP (AIX) so as you see, the definition of "not suited" is highly subjective.


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## SirDice (Jan 30, 2012)

Probably says enough...

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/nutshell.html#INTRODUCTION-NUTSHELL-USERS


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## fluca1978 (Jan 30, 2012)

ashkanra said:
			
		

> Hi all,
> 
> Personally I think they are wrong and freebsd FreeBSD can handle them.
> 
> What do you think about this? FreeBSD is good only for web servers or not?



At the moment I'm running FreeBSD for anything but a web server! FreeBSD has a very robust codebase and a lot of programs to deal with mission critical servers, you are going to love it.
And yes, your friends are wrong.


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## roddierod (Jan 30, 2012)

http://people.freebsd.org/~brooks/papers/bsdcon2003/fbsdcluster/

http://www.freebsd.org/projects/netperf/cluster.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bAsYz5pVwyc


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## ashkanra (Jan 31, 2012)

roddierod said:
			
		

> http://people.freebsd.org/~brooks/papers/bsdcon2003/fbsdcluster/
> 
> http://www.freebsd.org/projects/netperf/cluster.html
> 
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bAsYz5pVwyc



Really usefull links. Thanks.


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