I recently had to install the Solaris 10 operating system on HP servers with x86 architecture. More precisely, the hardware at my disposal consisted of two HP ProLiant DL380 G7, each with 2 processors, 12 cores and 36 GB of RAM. On the internet there are many guides, some offered by Oracle itself, which explain the process of configuring Solaris features with all the details relative to the most appropriate choice of parameters. In my case, I will focus in providing a quick and effective guide to the most commonly used settings.
Hardware setup
The first thing to do in these cases is to update the server with the latest firmware patch available, in this case I used the HP Service Pack for ProLiant 2013.02.0 (B) freely downloadable from the manufacturer’s website and using the HP Smart Update Manager console in interactive mode.
Once you update the server you need to define the space in which the operating system will be installed and to this purpose I used the HP Array Configuration Utility in the package mentioned above. My DL380 G7 server is shipped with one Smart Array P410i controller and 8 drive bays, 4 of which will be filled with 146 GB 15k SAS disks. Hence, the logical drive will consist of 3 active disks and a spare and will have a RAID5 configuration (strip size = 256 KB, sectors / track = 32, cache = enabled), thus providing 273 GB of usable space.
Optionally, you can also decide to perform a fine-tuning of the BIOS settings that can provide higher performance. In my case, within the BIOS P67 12/02/2012, I chose to change the default configuration of the following parameters (pressing F9 during boot):
- Power Management Options:
- HP Power Profile = Max Performance,
- HP Power Regulator = HP Static High Performance Mode;
- System Options, Processor Options:
- Intel Hyper Threading = Disabled
Finally, I always configure the ILO’s interface (press F8 while booting) with authorized users and the IP address on which to expose the login form accessible via the https protocol, in order to have access to the machines remotely in the event of emergency.
Software installation
After you booted the machine and inserted the CD, select in the GNU GRUB screen the “Oracle Solaris” item and then, in the next screen, choose “Oracle Solaris Interactive Text Console Session” installation mode, which allows you to install a ZFS root file system (highly recommended choice).
From this moment on, the installation process provides a guided tour through a number of choices from which you confirm by pressing “F2 = continue.” In my case, the parameters are configured as follows:
- Keyboard layout: choose yours
- Language: English
- Networked: Yes
- Network interfaces: specify all of the network interfaces you want to configure (at least one), e.g. bnx0
- Use DHCP? No
- Host name: specify a name which identifies this system on the network
- IP address: e.g. 192.168.1.100
- Is part of a subnet? Yes
- Netmask of its subnet: e.g. 255.255.0.0 (this will be stored in /etc/netmasks file)
- IPv6 enabled? No
- Default route: choose “Specify one” and type the IP address, e.g. 192.168.1.1 (this will be stored in /etc/defaultrouter file)
- Use Kerberos security? No (use Unix security instead)
- Use Name Services? None
- NFSv4 domain configuration: use the NFSv4 domain name derived by the system’s naming services
- Time zone: <Your Region>/<Your Country>, then insert current date/time
- Choose root password (strong enough!)
- Remote network services enabled? No (provides a more secure configuration, in which SSH is the only network service exposed to remote clients)
- Oracle registration: No, then skip proxy settings
- Installation type: standard
- Install on an iSCSI target? No
- Automatically eject CD/DVD? Yes
- Auto reboot? Yes
- Choose media: CD/DVD
- Accept license
- Geographic region support: North America / U.S.A[en_US.ISO8859-1]
- System locale: U.S.A[en_US.ISO8859-15]
- Additional products: None
- File system: ZFS
- Software: Entire Distribution Plus OEM support
- ZFS configuration: select c0t0d0 as boot disk and do not alter default settings
- Preserve data: No
- ZFS settings:
- ZFS Pool name: rpool
- ZFS Root Dataset name: root
- ZFS Pool Size: 279930 MB (whole space available)
- Size of Swap area: 8192 MB (i.e. about 25% of total RAM)
- Size of Dump area: 2048 MB
- Put /var on a separate dataset
- Mount remote file systems: No
At the end of the installation the server will boot automatically and you will have to manually remove the CD to start the machine with the newly installed operating system.
Once you have logged into the console as root is appropriate to view the contents of the file /var/adm/messages to make sure that there were no errors on boot. In addition, all transactions carried out during the installation process are described in the file /var/sadm/system/logs/install_log.
Have fun!
Luca Merello's blog 