I’ve been asked to install a couple of flash new SunFire x2100 opteron servers, and although they look nice and pretty, the administrators experience is anything but smooth or enjoyable.
If you’re into hardware, these boxes are very nice, you can see Andy Bechtelstein’s hands all over these new servers. Apparently Andy is hard of hearing, because the fans in the x2100 sound like a jet at take off when they boot, if you are going to spend any amount of time sitting beside these beasties get some ear plugs or headphones.
The piddly 30 page manual that comes with these boxes is pathetic and most of it is dedicated to installing rails for rack mounting, give me a break. Although the manual guarantees that Solaris 10 comes preinstalled on the hard disk, the two machines I was working with did not boot, which means I’m downloading Solaris 10 DVD image right now.
Surprisingly, the Windows Server 2003×64 install went fairly smoothly until I tried to access the network, and as it turns out the latest server install doesn’t have driver support for the Broadcom 5721 controller, so off to download the driver and drop it on a USB drive. Apparently Windows Server 2003×64 is certified on the x2100, but I guess they don’t use the network in their certification process.
