Struggling With Solaris and Bladecenter

I have recently come to appreciate that Sun Solaris is very cool. We have decided to use it as the OS for our large-volume data storage servers (backup and archived project data). I have previously installed Solaris on one of the blades in our IBM bladecenter. The blades are HS20 type 8843 blades, which are listed as supported on Sun’s support site.

Two days ago I started trying to install Solaris on another blade, which will be the one that manages all the storage. I started by trying to use the installation DVD in the Bladecenter’s DVD drive. If I have one complaint about the Bladecenter, it is that the DVD drive is dog-slow. I don’t know why, but it just crawls. Anyways, the DVD boots, starts loading the installation program, and then the blade crashes with a processor exception being logged to the Bladecenter management module. I tried various different installation modes with the same result. That took most of Tuesday. Wednesday, I started troubleshooting the blade itself. I checked the BIOS dates against the latest from IBM and determined that there were some BIOS updates to be done. I updated everything, and re-tried the install of Solaris, which again crashed. I then carefully went through each BIOS update again, and noticed that a small error message was coming up when the Broadcom ethernet chipset BIOS update ran, saying that the NVRAM had an invalid checksum. I ran the blade’s diagnostics program, and sure enough, the ethernet chipset is toast. I asked Stuart to send the logs and serial numbers to IBM for a warranty replacement. Hopefully that’s the problem that is preventing Solaris from installing.

IBM so far has been tremendous with support (we just started buying IBM server gear this year, having grown unimpressed with HP’s support over the past couple of years). Every warranty issue we’ve had so far has been dealt with swiftly and without any hassle. We’ll see what happens when we need to actually replace the blade.