unixwiz

Well as I posted the other day about the E25K domain and creating zones. I have started to create some zones on the X2100 tonight. With 2 SATA drives mirrored, and the machine idle it takes 6:32 minutes to create a zone. So almost twice as long as the E25K machine with the 1.1TB file system stripped across 17 drives and 6 SCSI controllers. Compared to the V890 which has a 3 disk raid 5 array, it would appear that using the SVM software raid is a real performance hit. The drives in the V890 are even fibre channel drives, but it still takes 30 minutes to create a zone on that machine. So how do we speed it up? not sure at the moment. On the one v890 I have Solaris 10 on, I have to quit using Raid 5 for the zones file system and went to Raid 10 (1+0) to get it to speed up, but unfortunatly I did not have enough drives in the second V890 to do that. If any one has any good tips on how to speed up SVM Raid 5 array’s let me know.

Solaris, Sun, X2100, Zones/Containers Solaris, Sun, X2100, Zones/Containers

Well after having to search all over town to find some place that sells a Null-modem cable (actually did not find one, had to buy a regular serial cable and a null modem adapter. Most expensive thing I bought at over $23.00 for the both. They even had to move stuff out of the way at Radio Shack to find the cable.) Anyways, I hooked the cable up to the X2100 and my other Solaris box, and yippe I get a console on it.

So, for all those who buy an X2100 here are some notes:

1. By default console redirection is set to ON. This means that even it you plug in a monitor/keyboard/mouse, you will only get to the first Solaris boot screen, it will then appear to lock after that. You can instantly tell when the machine boots if the console redirection is on, if the display “paints” extremely slow, (a la 9600 baud), on the monitor.
2. There are 2 network cards in it, one is an nge and one is a bge. The nge card is the primary card.
3. Hardware mirroring of the two SATA drives is NOT supported by Solaris
4. According to the Release Notes, Hot Swap of the SATA drives is NOT supported by Solaris. It is only supported by Microsoft Windows XP. (Boo!)
5. If you plan to run the server in your house, watch out as it is somewhat loud. On initial boot, the fans spin at over 15,000 RPM. After the BIOS has control they spin down to around 6,000RPM. But it is still rather loud (I currently have it running in my family room and it is too loud for there.)
6. Even with Console Redirection on, if you plug in a Keyboard/Mouse and Display you can control the bios on the machine.

As I write this it is half way thru reinstalling Solaris 10 U1… (I did not like the disk layout that it came with and I wanted a more recent version on it.)

Solaris, Sun, X2100 Solaris, Sun, X2100

Well the server came in today. I took it home, and put the additional harddrive and dvd drive in it. Hooked it up to a montior/keyboard and mouse and booted it, man the initial boot is loud with the internal fans going at well over 12,000RPM, they then quiet down a little to about 6,000 RPM. So up pops up the begining of the Solaris boot screen, and then it just goes blank. Nothing on the screen at all. Great, now what? Started going through the 4 little books that came with it, and no where in there did it say that by default that it uses serial redirection! I have played with a V20Z at the office and it did not do that. So I think in my attempts to figure out why there was nothing on the screen, I corrupted something on the boot disk. I was able to boot off of a Solaris 10 GA disk, but that is not supported by this hardware. I could see the disks in the machine, but that was it. So now I am in the process of downloading the Solaris 10 x86 U1 dvd so I can burn it and try to boot and install from it.

Another major gripe I have is this from the release notes for the server:

SATA Hot Plug for Windows XP OS Only
SATA hot plug is supported only for the Windows XP Operating System (OS). If you wish to change hard disks with Linux or Solaris, you must rebooth the system.

What the F****…. I mean no where on Sunsolve does it say this, in fact on this Sun Solve Doc #83605, it talks about the X2100 server and near the bottom you will see:

If the primary root disk fails, the system will continue to run from the
secondary boot disk. There will be SCSI errors on the console, about the disk
failure.

“Primary root disk can be replaced online without bringing down the system”

Note: It is not necessary to remove the failed disk using the cfgadm or devfsadm
commands. If a new disk is installed in place of the failed disk, just
execute the devfsadm command, so that the OS can recognize the new disk.
Then the “format” command will show the new disk. If the new installed
disk installed has no fdisk partition, then create the fdisk partition
from the format program, so that the new disk can be used for mirroring.

So I am confused, which is it? Can you or can’t you hot swap the drives? And why on earth would I want to run Windows XP on a server? I hope this little “feature” is fixed real soon.

Rant, Sun, X2100 Rant, Sun, X2100