> From: opensolaris-discuss-boun...@opensolaris.org [mailto:opensolaris- > discuss-boun...@opensolaris.org] On Behalf Of Ken Mays > > These Dell PowerEdge Servers are SOLARIS CERTIFIED as reported in the
For what it's worth, this has been my experience with sol10/osol on dell servers: Getting sol 10 installed sometimes requires special tricks, because the driver for the perc raid controller isn't included, or the sata optical drive. Or both. So far, I have always been able to enable the sata optical drive by entering bios and changing the sata mode to ATA or compatible or whatever. Before I learned that, I followed internet blogs that said install from an external USB optical drive. So far, I have always been able to download the perc driver ISO from support.dell.com and then the installation process is like this ... You boot from the sol10 CD. At some point you hit "5" or "F5" to load special drivers from another ISO. And then things progress fine. OpenManage is not available on solaris/opensolaris, so you're lacking the software utility to reconfigure the perc card while the OS is running. This is particularly important if you wish to replace a failed disk without shutting down into BIOS to configure the perc. Instead, MegaCli is available. It's very hard to find, and very difficult to use. Getting osol installed only requires one special trick: Change the optical to ATA mode, since the CD doesn't have the SATA driver for that optical drive. Afterward, the same comments apply, regarding perc, openmanage, and MegaCli. I definitely endorse the use of sol10/osol on Dell hardware, if you need to save money compared to sun/oracle, and you don't need the more powerful hardware (beyond what dell offers). It's not as great as using Sun/Oracle hardware, but if the wimpier dell servers are powerful enough for you ... then it's vastly lower cost. _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
