Sun x4150
My employer ordered one of the shiny new dual-socket quad-core 1U Sun x4150 machines to go into our loaner pool. Since we ordered a base model and a bunch of extra components, there was a whole pile of boxes waiting for me when I stopped by the office on Sunday. I spent about 45 minutes opening boxes and putting in the assorted components (added 14 sticks of RAM, 2nd processor + heat sink, 8 SAS drives, DVD drive, SAS RAID controller, extra power supply).
When I first tried booting Solaris 2008/07 on it, the machine hung before getting to the “Configuring devices” section. I went to the x4150 documentation center and looked at the x4150 Product Notes. Unfortunately the Product Notes used chip nick names, so I had to decipher if the CPUs installed were from the Harpertown family. The docs indicated that a firmware update was needed.
Updating the firmware ended up being a piece of cake. I downloaded and burned an ISO of the Sun Fire X4150 Tools & Drivers CD Version 1.1. You then boot off the CD-ROM and select the menu option which says to update the firmware. After doing this, the Solaris installer seemed to be running fine, but unfortunately I had to head out. I’ll try to test the machine out when I get back from Philly next week.
Google bait: x4150 hang hung failed