Which SPARC package should I install on my OS?

[mctester]

I have a simple question about the two splunk solaris (sparc) packages you provide.

On the left side of the download page: you have this: Solaris 8, 9, 10 (SPARC)

and on the right you have to two filenames: splunk-4.1.2-79191-solaris-8-sparc.pkg.Z and splunk-4.1.2-79191-SunOS-sparc.tar.Z

The fact that the filename above has "solaris 8" in it makes me feel that it will only be supported for solaris 8 and I should use the tar.Z file for the solaris 9 & 10 sparc installs we have.

but based on the left title classifying it.. that makes me think i can use the .pkg.Z format across all 8/9/10 solaris sparc installs.

Can you clarify this for me?

[gkanapathy]

Solaris 8 indicates that it requires Solaris 8 or higher. The only difference between the two packages is the packaging: One is a Solaris pkg, the other is a compressed tar file. The code is identical.

[Mick · Accepted solution]

Both packages should install on any of the OS versions listed.

However, I do recommend that you rethink your platform choice for your Splunk server. The SPARC architecture is well known to be a performance inhibitor for Splunk, so if you want your instance to be able to search and index data at a high rate, you should deploy on a 64-bit Linux or Windows platform if available.

[jrodman]

Search heads can do a lot of computation for some searches. I would recommend investing in x86-64 for all nodes performing splunk search activity, unless you can be very certain that your searches are not going to ever involve significant computation work -- a very atypical case.

[gkanapathy]

Might make a good search head for a large distributed Splunk cluster though.

[gkanapathy]

I'd say this is true for some SPARC machines/servers, but not all. In particular, processors with many threads (e.g. 32 threads) but low clock rates (designed for wide but thin workloads like web serving) will not give good performance with Splunk without a lot of trickery.