System Administration Guide: Basic Administration

What Are Servers, Clients, and Appliances?

Systems on the network can usually be described as one of the following:

System Type	Description
Server	A system that provides services to other systems in its network. There are file servers, boot servers, web servers, database servers, license servers, print servers, installation servers, appliance servers, and even servers for particular applications. This chapter uses the term server to mean a system that provides boot services and file systems for other systems on the network.
Client	A system that uses remote services from a server. Some clients have no disk storage capacity and they have to rely on remote file systems from a server to function. Diskless systems and appliance systems are examples of this type of client. Other clients might use remote services (such as installation software) from a server, but they don't rely on a server to function. A standalone system, which has its own hard disk containing the root (`/`), `/usr`, and `/export/home` file systems and swap space, is a good example of this type of client.
Appliance	A network appliance such as the Sun Ray appliance provides access to applications and the Solaris environment. An appliance gives you centralized server administration and no client administration or upgrades. Sun Ray appliances also provide hot desking, which is the ability to instantly access your computing session from any appliance in the server group, exactly where you left off. For more information, see `http://www.sun.com/products/sunray`.

System Type

Description

Server

A system that provides services to other systems in its network. There are file servers, boot servers, web servers, database servers, license servers, print servers, installation servers, appliance servers, and even servers for particular applications. This chapter uses the term server to mean a system that provides boot services and file systems for other systems on the network.

Client

A system that uses remote services from a server. Some clients have no disk storage capacity and they have to rely on remote file systems from a server to function. Diskless systems and appliance systems are examples of this type of client.

Other clients might use remote services (such as installation software) from a server, but they don't rely on a server to function. A standalone system, which has its own hard disk containing the root (/), /usr, and /export/home file systems and swap space, is a good example of this type of client.

Appliance

A network appliance such as the Sun Ray appliance provides access to applications and the Solaris environment. An appliance gives you centralized server administration and no client administration or upgrades. Sun Ray appliances also provide hot desking, which is the ability to instantly access your computing session from any appliance in the server group, exactly where you left off. For more information, see http://www.sun.com/products/sunray.