Sun

The time has come to upgrade my server to handle some beefier workloads, so I hopped over to eBay and picked up a Sun Fire T2000 with 16GB of RAM and the 8-core 1.0Ghz Niagara CPU. Once I slap in four new 73GB SAS drives and load up the best Linux distro of all time (Debian, of course) this new box will replace my current server as the primary Nekoware mirror.

So far, my biggest complaint without actually touching the box is an apparent lack of RAID options beyond 0 and 1. With 4 disks, I'm certainly not going to stripe - I would like to have a RAID5 array at least. However, it looks like the best I can do is use two RAID1 arrays and set them up as LVM PVs to get one large contiguous disk area. Does anyone have a better idea, or know of a way to get RAID5 working on these boxes? I could buy an external controller if necessary.

Also, to avoid the PITA ILOM firmware issues I had with my last Sun box, I've got updated firmware files ready and waiting.

Does anyone here have experience with the Sun/Oracle Niagara-based servers, and if so, do you have any complaints or tips for getting the most out of them?

They are nice boxes, and I was always impressed by the quality of their design and make.
It would make a very nice nekoware mirror; do me a favor though, and once you have it setup could you please measure the power drawn?

I have a fully loaded (well, formally fully loaded, currently gutted for ram) T2K in the server room. Pretty useless, those T1 cpus are wicked slow (and ours is a 1.28). Barely good enough to replace the old v240s (hint, still running v240s). If it wasn't for the crypto unit it these things would have no place in the server market but as it is they make for ok web servers.

Putting linux on it makes me ill a little. You wont have access to LDOMs at the point and will likely have stability and performance issues and no support for the crypto unit either.

Of course, I am talking out my ass as I have no idea of the state of linux on sparc but it's not something i spend money on to find out.

That's one thing that I was debating (and am now debating once more after reading your post) - which OS to use. I'm in love with apt on Debian, and coming from an existing Debian box it would make the transition very seamless, but at the same time the lack of crypto hardware support for Linux does worry me.

Also I've seen a lot of benchmarks on the T2000 that peg Debian/Ubuntu above Solaris in terms of web server performance, by a pretty sizable amount too. On the other hand, now might be a great time to learn Solaris if it means I get better hardware support in the OS and more configuration options.

Solaris out of the box isn't what you want to run. The default webstack is junk on coolthreads. There was (is?) a cool threads optimized webstack for these boxes which makes a difference. Then you want to make sure the crypto is setup and working (which I dont have the docs for anymore so google is your friend).

Its kind of fair to say that by default Solaris 10 works as a server, but is really tuned for a workstation (especially NFS). There will be lots of things you will want to tweak and change to make it work for your task at hand.

Have you been able to try Solaris 11 yet? If I do go the Solaris route I'll probably go 11, but it seems too... eh, "tainted" by Oracle, so 10 might be my fallback option.

11 yes, on the t2k, no. I think there is a firmware level required to boot 11 on it too so you might be SOL if the machine doesn't come patched (support required for patches). I would google it...

S10u10 is a pretty solid release.

Interesting to here the V240's nearly perform as well as the T1 (T1000/T2000) servers.

The T2K must not really be so fast as I thought as a Dual V240 with USIIIi 1.5's was still a slow box compared to a Dual Core Intel 1U Generic Server!

If I recall correctly the benchmarks for the T1K/T2K compared against the then withdrawing NetBurst Xeons (absolute Dogs in speed, power and heat) which I thought was a bit cheeky. Against even a 2006 Dual 5300 they were struggling.

So why don't they sell cheaply (((( at least in the UK...

Yeah, it depends on the job at hand of course, but the T1 based servers have a very specific niche where they do "OK". haha

Making Larry richer so he can buy more islands.

Solaris 11 is up and running on the T2000. So far it's going well, except for some reason the drive refuses to boot my Solaris 10 installation DVD, so all I could do was use the Solaris 11 Automated Installer to set up RAID1 and load an OS. Solaris 11 is so foreign to me, and Oracle's stupid little command-line utilities (ipadm, svc, etc.) are making my job harder than it has to be, but Google is my friend and together, we shall prevail.

The box threw a fit when I tried to boot the Debian installer straightaway, but a quick firmware update fixed that. Then once I got Debian installed, it would hang during boot-up, and I had no idea what was causing it. Poking around init.d in single user mode proved futile. So I tried Gentoo, which wouldn't even make it past the init stages of the installation CD.

So now I'm patching UnixBench to allow >16 CPUs, and barring any major hiccups, should have some scores posted soon for this temperamental little server.

Turns out the particular server I got either A) hates Linux, B) hates me, or C) is just not a good platform for the things I want to do.

Wouldn't accept the Solaris 10 DVD, benchmarked very slow in Solaris 11 (slower than my existing server), would install Debian but wouldn't boot past the rc.local init phase, wouldn't even boot into the Gentoo installation disc, RAID array kept complaining about geometry, and the ALOM was a royal pain in the ass.

As plain-jane as HP x86 servers may seem, they're very reliable and predictable machines in my experience. I'll be snatching up an 8-core Core2-based Xeon box very soon and sending this PITA Niagara platform right back out the door.

the T's are indeed not made for linux. as a former long time solaris admin, we used the T3/T4 as virt platform. i can not imagine whats the deal running linux on them...when
i can not use ldoms i dont need a T. better get some intel box for debian.

Believe it or not, that is something that makes sense these days (as I said in my first post, the T1 series are painfully useless). I just installed a lab of 20 HP servers (new DL120g7s (nodes), a dl320g5p (install server), and a dl365 (vpn)) and I wouldn't change a thing, rock solid env.

In my office I have another dl120g7 and a dl360g5. The 360s and 365s of that era can be had really cheap on ebay these days (the 320g5p was also really cheap). Alternatively, the Sun X4100M2 and X4150 series can also be had really cheap and come with a full featured iLom vs the license required iLo on the HPs.

Hope that helps.

Indeed, it sounds like SPARC has become very much a niche platform since the T series. I'll probably just grab a cheap Netra X1 to quench my SPARClust from time to time.


If it weren't for the limited memory, slower CPU and now-crowded disk space on my current webserver (a DL360g4) I'd happily stay with it as it's been going strong for a few years now. But the DL360g5s have come down a lot and the newer quad-core Xeons are calling my name. That, and moving from 2 SCSI drives to 6 SAS drives in the same 1RU footprint.

Been there with Sun's Fire X series before. What frustrated me most was Oracle's selfishness in locking down all of Sun's old firmware files, so updating to fix ILOM bugs was not happening... also, does HP's ILO require a license? I didn't think it did, because my 360g4 runs ILO1 just fine up to the latest version and I can freely download the latest firmware. Did they change this with ILO2-based systems? Because that will be a big deal breaker for me.

You need a license on iLo to unlock the gui mode for the remote console post install. If you are text only, you don't need it.

The same for iLO3 but you can install 'iLO Integrated Remote Console' on a remote Windows machine and do the same without license.

Just gotta chime in here. Depending on what you are doing, they can make for amazing webservers. If it's purely static content (or reverse proxying / SSL offloading), and you use a properly multi-threaded webserver, even the T1000 and T2000 can eat requests like there's no tomorrow. I had a couple of T1000s (booting from a SAN) fronting a bunch of V240s on some very busy websites; the T1000s barely broke a sweat, and they could handle an insane amount of traffic. Another great niche we found was as LDAP servers - a pair of T2000s ran iPlanet/SunOne/whatever-they-were-calling-it-back-then really well.

Of course, anything dynamic and they started to choke[1] but for their niche, they were amazing. It's a real shame what happened with Oracle, otherwise I'd have no hesitation recommending a similar architecture again.

-Mark

[1] An interesting demonstration of where you could see how even the poor single-threaded performance of a T1 could scale up, was to compile Apache alongside an AMD64 box. The AMD64 box got through the "./configure" step minutes before the T2000, but as soon as you got to doing a parallel make ("gmake -j64"), it ripped through the compilation and left the quad-core AMD64 in the dust.

The iPlanet/ SunOne/ WebWhatever thing is hot. Makes Apache look like a ghost warrior.

I just sold my T1000 as small and powerful as it was?

Why?

The noise level was louder than servers 4U in size and twice as long.... I almost believe a V490 or even V880 would not be as loud as the T1000....
I would never have believed such a small box could be so loud.... so loud that it could be heard through concrete walls...

It is the loudest server I have *EVER* heard... and I've put software builds on 100's of Digital VAX/Compaq/HP/IBM servers in my time.

Crazy noise.

Hope you fare better with the T2000!!