[OpenIndiana-discuss] Sun Fire

[Saso Kiselkov]

On 23/06/2013 14:30, Christopher Chan wrote:
> Have you tried this Saso?

I haven't tried that particular box, but given that physical
construction is irrelevant when dealing with compatibility, I wouldn't
worry about it. What matters is what chips are in there.

Beware about depth of the machine, though (889mm), because it is about
15cm more than your average X4540. See
http://storage.chinabyte.com/422/12589422.shtml for details of the
physical arrangement.

> Illumos runs on that board and with the
> onboard SAS controller? Man, I want to look at the insides and see how
> they managed to turn those bays into double disk bays.

AFAIK LSI SAS 2308 *is* supported in Illumos just fine, so any
reasonably recent Illumos-derived distro (oi_151a8, OmniOS r151006)
should work out of the box. I have a pair of machines with Intel C602J
chipset motherboards from Supermicro and I couldn't get PCI-e slots
attached to CPU socket #2 to work - so beware if you plan to use more
than 2 PCI-e cards (for me it luckily wasn't an issue).

Also note that you don't have to buy the pre-built barebone machine. You
can buy the chassis + motherboard separately. Have a good look at the
chassis info and what motherboards are compatible, Supermicro publishes
detailed parts lists on their website. In my case Supermicro didn't
offer a barebone machine with the motherboard I wanted (with 10 GigE
on-board), so I bought the chassis + motherboard separately (+ some
accessories to fit it all together nicely).

Cheers,
-- 
Saso