I've been working as a support engineer for Sun partners for 2 years now, and I worked with a lot of servers, tape libraries, and SAN storage. I have also done a lot of server installations and gone to a lot of trainings.
Now, I'm offered to do Solaris administration on-site. I'm afraid that managing one site (it's a bank) servers will not give me good experience, specially that the environment is stable, with only some database and application developments. I will be handling Solaris operating system on 20 servers..or less.
Can anyone advice ? which career has better future ?
The thing is, with support I get to deal with more systems, and I get more exposure and more work.
With on site admin...you will handle the same systems, and the environment is kind of stable..I'm afraid of not getting good experience ? or do you have suggestions on how to get good experience while handling one site (solaris admin) ?
I dont have permission to delete my post, please any forum admin delete my post there. I want it in the sun - solaris section, here it obviously gets more attention
as duke says, depends on taste. however, when i was a sys admin, i had an on-call schedule. for a week i was available 24x7. if you don't mind waking up at 3:30am and attempting to figure out why a system just died after a developer attempted to compile something then why not be an admin?
i think for me its usually about my personal life and how much it(job) will impact my life. work is work. sometimes you are slammed and other times you have downtime to study and learn. maybe the admin role expects you to work 13 hour days but the pay is a significant increase from what you have now. for me, being an admin isn't the top job when your personal life suffers. find something that fits for you.
Working in Banks, Ive seen this problem many a time. The good old boundries of sun service hardware guys, trying to get into sys admin. There was a real stigma back in the day regarding this.
I had a few mates that were sun hardware guys, that transfered over to sysadmin. The difference is that within the hardware areas, you have clear faults, e.g. disks, cpu's, boards, etc etc. In the sysadmin world, nothing is clear, as your trying to find performance issues, faulty code, faulty installations.
I found that many sun hardware guys had nearly all the courses, but just didnt have the trust in themselves to go into sysadmin. Although you feel the onsite locatiom has a stable setup, you will probably discover it isnt. Stable from a hardware point of view, but inefficent in regards to peformance, disk usage and other application issues.
For me, the choice is simple, its time for sysadmin. Once a sysadmin, your career choice is wider and you will earn more ����.
As for call out at 3am, yes in some contracts you get this, but in others you dont, so dont take it as gospal.
See, I think it's different from one place to another.
I'm the middle east, and here we're not called "Sun hardware" guys...we're simply "sun engineers" or sun support.
Usually on site admins, if they have support contract, they will call whenever anything happen to the system (be it hardware, OS, third party software)...and they're usually database admins.
Hardware is stable...it usually doesn't fail very often, but most of the calls we get are OS related (SVM, veritas,..user support, ...) a lot actually.
But it's hectic...you can't keep running from site to site to the rest of your life.
I think it's time for sysadmin...at least I can focus more on operating system...and get different experience.
