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Solaris Now an Option for IBM Blades
Amiga Trombone writes to tell us that IBM and Sun have reached an agreement allowing Solaris 10 to be supported on IBM BladeCenter servers. From the article: "IBM confirmed the move in a statement, saying Sun is among more than 700 partners in the "BladeCenter ecosystem" and that as an operating system option, Solaris joins Windows, Linux for x86 and Power chips, and IBM's AIX version of Unix. IBM won't sell Solaris or support for the operating system to customers, IBM said. Anyone interested will have to purchase the software and support from Sun."
This announcement covers running Solaris 10 for x86 on Xeon EM64T or AMD blades (HS20 and LS20) it does NOT mean that Solaris will run on the JS20 PowerPC blades.
Sun 'leaked it out' via a blog post on Mr. Schwartz weblog. Official support from IBM as far as being posted on the NOS Cert site will be December.
Update 1 is needed to support the BladeCenter's USB DVD-ROM drive for a local install, however you can PXE boot install it and it works fine. Update 1 is coming out shortly which is why IBM hadn't published anything about their intent to support it as an OS. Software and Utility support (RAID Manager, Systems Management software drivers) will be coming forward over the course of the 1H of 2006. If you have a BladeCenter, or are interested in one, feel free to contact your local IBM person and they should be able to give you more information.
The reason your rep was probably caught by surprise when you called them is that we hadn't told them we were working on it yet as it was under non-disclosure.
You might try talking to your IBM rep again as more information has been given out internally, we're just not advertising it officiall until later this month, with the support posted in December.
Your three concern points, well, i don't know about the EVA portion but I thought HP supported Solaris. However I'd assume if Solaris supports SAN Boot and MP Failover as it is, the hardware in the BladeCenter wouldn't affect it any and allow it to work. The big one though would be EVA support though because if their multipath driver isn't done/working/whatever the rest might be a moot point.
Our intentions deep within the bowels of IBM was not to support Solaris 10 as a 'publicity stunt', but more as we are getting requests to support it on the platform from customers. Our intent is to support both Intel architecture as well as AMD Architecture processors, but not Power.
FWIW, my day job is:
Tom Boucher
IBM Americas xSeries BladeCenter/x3 Architecture Product Manager
tboucher at us dot ibm dot com
As a CYA I'm not posting this for my employer, more because I'm as interested in technology as the rest of us that view this site. Views expressed are my own, etc. etc.
As a rock-in-roll Physicist once said, No matter where you go, there you are.
Yeah, so I got an IBM blade center, good stuff. HS20s are ok, JS20s are "da bomb" as the kids on the street say (when they are refering to Power based AIX boxes). And you know, I like Solaris 10, I run it at home, it makes a nice KDC and OpenAFS fileserver. I would like to run Solaris 10 on the bladecenter, so you would think this is good news right?
Well, suprisingly, what has been holding me back is not so much that I have been eagerly awaiting a press release telling me I can. What has been holding me back is that the solaris 10 installer DOES NOT FUCKING SUPPORT USB CDROMS DRIVES! It's been months, and it is a well known issue, that is all the blade center has, and every other damn OS on earth supports it.
So yes, I could set up a bootp and tftp server and install solaris that way, but you know what? That is just slightly more trouble that I want to go to when I can just throw an AIX or Debian cd in.
So in closing, IBM and Sun, in the future: Fewer press releases and more support for USB CDROMS would probably go further in getting people to put Solaris on a bladecenter.
Finkployd
> If you have a BladeCenter,
;-)
:-/
n t.do?sitestyle=ibm&lndocid=MIGR-60579
Yes. With 8 LS 20 blades.
Well, no. The company I work for owns one. Or it's leased, I don't remember.
> Your three concern points, well, i don't know about the EVA portion but I thought HP supported Solaris.
Yes.
On SPARC.
Upto Solaris9.
Officially.
I was planning to go to Linux-world in Frankfurt, later this month and grill SUN+HP about it, but I don't know if I can make it there.
It was painfull enough to get it to boot RH4 from the SAN. The lesson learned is that unless there's a HP-driver, it's not worth booting-up the blade
But thanks anyway for the information.
Oh, and before I forget: when can I do a remote-install via the "software-cdrom" on the java-console?
According to
http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/docume
it's not supported...
Rainer
rainer at ultra-secure dot de
Windows 2000 - from the guys who brought us edlin
This will benefit both parties.
IBM need "Unix" on x86. AMD/Intel have the lions share of cheap processors that will do everything that 90% of customers need. As "Grid" gets more mature they will become more and more important, especially as 10Gbit and faster ethernet speeds become common and optimized TCP/IP stacks and dedicated hardware mean that you don't need to lose a processor in each node just to handle your grid interconnects.
AIX doesn't run on x86, and it won't be ported to x86. As much as I love linux, it still has still some maturity problems when you start playing in the enterprise space, most of them to do with getting all the right libraries for your various applications to play nicely together and do on-the-fly upgrades that don't break application support. (Of course, some ISVs like that you have to buy a new version of their software to upgrade your OS, but most hardware vendors would prefer that the money came to them rather than the ISVs).
IBM, HP and I believe Intel are working on a "Standard Linux", which will fix the inter-ISV problems. How long before that becomes (1)stable, (2) ported to by ISVs and (3) accepted by corporations will remain to be seen. (The big trick in the "chicken and egg" scenario between (2) and (3)). I'd say at least a couple of years.
There are some real funky things in Solaris 10, but these will move into Linux, either by porting code from OpenSolaris or parallel development. A side issue may be the SCO FUD. Although we all know that SCO's claims are baseless, CxOs scare more easily, and may feel that Linux is still open to legal challenges in the future. Solaris is unencumbered (though it might be interesting to see what happens now that they've opened it).
On the other side of the coin, most people still don't trust Sun with Solaris x86. Although they are finally backing their x86 strategy with some real hardware, many of us remember the on-again, off-again x86 strategy from the last few years. I think they're on the right track now, but CxOs have to be sure before betting the business.
So, IBM benefit from having an industrial grade Unix on their blade servers for people who don't want to go Linux. Sun benefit by breaking the "proprietary Unix" tag that RedHat are using to attack Sun's installed base, showing that yes, our downloadable OS run's on other people's platforms.
Norman Cook's Ode to Sl
Having been closely involved with a project that went with a IBM Bladecentre + SAN solution, I can say "never again". The Bladecentres don't actually provide any pwer redundancy when you stock them more then 2/3 full of blades, so you have this ridiculous situation where you have to run your Bladecentres half full, thereby obviating their density benefits. If you do want to run you Bladecentres near capacity (what a novel idea), you will find that it will randomly refuse to power up blades. Add this to a litany of complaints (especially the crappy remote management) and makes 1/2RU servers look tempting again.