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Sun Fire™ B1600 Chassis and
B100s, B100x, and B200x Blade
Product Notes
Sun Microsystems, Inc.
4150 Network Circle
Santa Clara, CA 95054 U.S.A.
650-960-1300
Part No. 817-5626-12
May 2004, Revision A
Send comments about this document to:docfeedback@sun.com
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Copyright 2004 Sun Microsystems, Inc., 4150 Network Circle, Santa Clara, California 95054, U.S.A. All rights reserved. Sun Microsystems, Inc. has intellectual property rights relating to technology embodied in the product that is described in this document. In particular, and without limitation, these intellectual property rights may include one or more of the U.S. patents listed at http://www.sun.com/patents and one or more additional patents or pending patent applications in the U.S. and in ot
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Contents 1. Documentation and Miscellaneous Information 1–1 1.1 Upgrading the BIOS on a B200x Server Blade 1–2 1.2 Before Installing Solaris x86 Onto a Blade 1–2 1.3 Miscellaneous Information 1–2 1.3.1 Using N1 Provisioning Software 1–2 1.3.2 Using the Sun Fire B10n Content Load Balancing Blade 1–3 1.3.3 Downloading New Firmware for Chassis Components 1–3 1.4 Viewing the Latest Documentation for the Chassis and Its Components 1– 4 1.4.1 Documentation in this Release 1–4 1.4.2 Documentation Errat
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3.1 Preparing to Install Solaris x86 Onto a Blade 3–1 3.1.1 Solaris x86 Drivers and Documentation 3–2 3.1.2 Overview of the Solaris x86 Installation Process 3–3 3.2 Applying Mandatory Software Patches to the Solaris x86 Install Image 3– 3 3.2.1 Downloading the B100x/B200x Mandatory Software for the Network Install Server 3–4 3.2.2 Creating a Network Install Server 3–6 3.3 Issues Affecting B100x and B200x Server Blades That are Running Solaris x86 3–8 3.3.1 Issues for Which You Must Apply a Worka
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6.3.1 Aggregated Links 6–10 6.3.2 Switch-to-switch Tagged VLAN Trunk Connections 6–11 6.4 Setting up a Tagged VLAN Trunk With Cisco Switches 6–12 Contents v
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vi Sun Fire™ B1600 Chassis and B100s, B100x, and B200x Blade Product Notes • May 2004
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CHAPTER 1 Documentation and Miscellaneous Information These Product Notes contain important information about this release of the Sun Fire B1600 blade system chassis. This is the first release of the product to support Enterprise Linux version 3.0 and SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 8, running on B100x and B200x server blades. This chapter contains the following sections: Section 1.1, “Upgrading the BIOS on a B200x Server Blade” on page 1-2 Section 1.2, “Before Installing Solaris x86 Onto a Bla
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1.1 Upgrading the BIOS on a B200x Server Blade To run Red Hat Enterprise Linux version 3.0 or SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 8 on a B200x server blade, you must first upgrade the BIOS to version1.1.32. This version of the BIOS is available from the following website: http://wwws.sun.com/software/download/network.html For information on how to upgrade the BIOS on B200x blades with Linux installed, see Section 2.2, “Upgrading the BIOS on B200x Server Blades” on page 2-3 in these Product Notes. 1.2 B
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1.3.2 Using the Sun Fire B10n Content Load Balancing Blade The Sun Fire B10n Content Load Balancing Blade is now available to provide load balancing across server blades in the Sun Fire B1600 Blade System Chassis and other horizontally scaled Sun platforms. To use the B10n Content Load Balancing Blade, you need to upgrade the firmware on the System Controller to version 1.1 or later. To perform the upgrade of the System Controller firmware, refer to the Sun Fire B1600 Blade System Chassis Admini
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1.4 Viewing the Latest Documentation for the Chassis and Its Components For the most up-to-date documentation, including the most up-to-date Product Notes, visit the following Sun documentation website: http://www.sun.com/products-n-solutions/hardware/docs/Servers/ 1.4.1 Documentation in this Release Documentation for the Sun Fire B1600 blade system chassis and its components is provided on the CD supplied with a chassis or blade. The documentation is in Adobe Acrobat PDF format, therefore you n
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1.4.2 Documentation Errata In the printed version of the Sun Fire B1600 Blade System Chassis Compliance and Safety Manual (817-2571-10), the contact details given for Zuheir Totari are out of date. The correct contact details are as follows: Sun Microsystems Ltd Sparc House Guillemont Park Blackwater Camberley GU17 9QC United Kingdom Sun Microsystems Tel: +44 (0)1252 420113 Fax: +44 (0)1252 421659 Chapter 1 Documentation and Miscellaneous Information 1-5
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1-6 Sun Fire™ B1600 Chassis and B100s, B100x, and B200x Blade Product Notes • May 2004
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CHAPTER 2 Linux This chapter contains the following sections: Section 2.1, “Installing Linux Onto a B100x or B200x Blade” on page 2-2 Section 2.2, “Upgrading the BIOS on B200x Server Blades” on page 2-3 Section 2.3, “B100x and B200x (Linux) Server Blade Issues” on page 2-5 2-1
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2.1 Installing Linux Onto a B100x or B200x Blade To install the Linux operating system onto a blade, you must first build a PXE boot installation environment. The software required to build a PXE boot installation environment is available on the CD supplied with the blade. To install Linux on B100x or B200x server blades you will need the following: The Sun Fire B1600 Platform Documentation, Drivers, and Installation CD. This CD includes the drivers required for installing Linux on a server bl
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2.2 Upgrading the BIOS on B200x Server Blades To run Red Hat Enterprise Linux version 3.0 or SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 8, service pack 3 on a B200x server blade, the blade must have BIOS version 1.1.32 installed. This version of the BIOS is available from the following website: http://wwws.sun.com/software/download/network.html You can upgrade the BIOS on the blade using the biosupdate utility. This utility loads a device driver calledmtdbios, performs the BIOS update using theslflash utility
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2. Check the version of the BIOS currently running on the blade, to establish whether the upgrade is necessary: modprobe mtdbios cat /proc/BIOS BIOS Vendor: AMI BIOS Version: P1.1.32 BIOS Date: 01/19/2004 Manufacturer: Sun Microsystems Product: Sun Fire B200x rmmod mtdbios 3. Copy the BIOS image from the beta website to a known location on the blade. 4. Run the biosupdate command: biosupdatebios2p.rom-032.bin The blade prompt returns when the update is complete. Caution – Do not restart the blad
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2.3 B100x and B200x (Linux) Server Blade Issues The following problems have been observed on both B100x and B200x server blades: 4868095: Red Hat Advanced Server 2.1 does not support layer 2 VLANs The Advanced Server kernel (version 2.4.9-e.3) does not support layer 2 VLANs. This means that thesunconfig utility is not installed on blades running Red Hat Advanced Server 2.1. If you are using blades with Red Hat Advanced Server 2.1 installed, you must configure the switch to use only untagged VL
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4991972: B200x blade locks into a repeated “boot net” loop following a BIOS update The CMOS footprint may change between revisions of the BIOS. If this is the case, and the CMOS is not reset to its default values during the blade reboot following a BIOS update, the CMOS configuration may become corrupted and result in repeated network boots. To avoid this problem, after updating the BIOS on a B200x blade, reset all CMOS settings to their default values when you next reboot the blade. You can d
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CHAPTER 3 Solaris x86 This chapter contains the following sections: Section 3.1, “Preparing to Install Solaris x86 Onto a Blade” on page 3-1 Section 3.2, “Applying Mandatory Software Patches to the Solaris x86 Install Image” on page 3-3 Section 3.3, “Issues Affecting B100x and B200x Server Blades That are Running Solaris x86” on page 3-8 Note – If you intend to use the Solaris x86 CD media (instead of the DVD media), you need to use a Solaris x86 system to read the CDs. For more informatio
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3.1.1 Solaris x86 Drivers and Documentation For the first full release of the Solaris x86 software to support B100x or B200x blades, the documentation and some mandatory patches required for Solaris 9 (12/03) are available on the web. Note – The Sun Fire B1600 Blade Platform Documentation, Drivers, and Installation CD that ships with the blade and chassis does not (at the time of writing) contain documentation or patch software for running Solaris 9 x86 on a B100x blade. To download the document
