On Tuesday 02 August 2005 00:09, Jim Wildman wrote:
Sure. The issues I am aware of are around the management processor implementation. The server has an embedded PPC based processor that has the ability to access either the serial port, or the console directly. However, it does neither automatically, out of the box or without some work on the OS side. There are no SNMP MIB's available (that I know of) for accessing the information it may have access to. It is particularly difficult to get Solaris to function with the serial port as 'console'.
I have to agree with you there. Unless you're willing to set up the whole console setup (NSV and all) the box is a pain to deal with. If you set up everything properly, you get SNMP for monitoring at least (which is better than nothing)... If you only have a few of these servers NSV is a huge pain. If you have several racks full, you can actually see the benefits of this design and understand why they did what they did. Until then, you're left with either a useless SP or a setup that is stupid and "unusual" - just something else you need to learn.
The setup you have to do on the OS side is Intel's fault (http://www.intel.com/design/servers/ipmi/) - and not a design that newisys did themselves... if this spec lives on, some day you might have os support by default...
Compay btw, also required you to load software to have fully functional RIB functionality - its just part of their cd set...
This is in contrast to HP's RIB/iLO family of cards, which work out of the box for either direct or web based console access, and with minimal OS configuration can access the serial port. They come with a complete set of MIBs and easily installed OS modules. The latest versions support ssh as well as web, and both text and graphical access allow you to mount remote 'virtual' media for installation, etc.
Yes - that's the keyword... virtual media... That's the one functionality the v40z doesn't support that HP has... Galaxy gladly fixed that issue.
Part of the issue may be that Sun did not/could not buy the complete package from Newisys. If you look at the Newisys web page, it looks like they have functionality that may come close to HP's, but it is locked up on the Sun boxes. The web server is running, but all roads (that I could find) lead no where.
Yep :-( If you have a NSV, update to the latest firmware... fixes quite a bit but still doesn't give you all the functionality HP has... And it gets rid of the SP errors that cause the "press any key to continue" :-D
Additionally, the v40z is an orphan. Sun has announced plans to replace them (and their little brothers, v20z) with 'Galaxy' class boxes of their own design.
I don't think that the v40z being an older design should say much here. After all its been out there for a while and SUN will sell you the boxes even after Galaxy is out.
All of that said, once they are installed, they seem to be rock solid. If you are expecting a very Solaris looking platform for Linux, the v40z fills the bill. If you are expecting a Wintel type platform (ala HP), it doesn't even get in the game.
I can completely agree with this statement. Depending on what we do, we often run the v40z without SP at all - as a plain dumb box without management. The board, the layout of the box (hardware) and all is great... The SP is a huge pain... I get this complaint all the time and sun also knows about it (hence the move to galaxy). The huge difference there will be that the SP is completely redesigned. From what I can tell, they basicly reimplemented what Compaq had feature by feature...
Peter.