Re: Sun Fire 6800
- From: "Tim Bradshaw" <tfb+google@xxxxxxxx>
- Date: 26 Mar 2006 13:16:42 -0800
vinsidus@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
Hi all,
This is something new for me.
My company just ordered a brand new Sun Fire 6800. My admins told me to
study about domains?? as I am going to shift to a bit higher level team
to manage Mid range and High end servers.
Any idea what domains are for??
Boxes like the 6800 can be partitioned at the hardware / firmware
level into several different machines - called domains. Each domain
has one or more system boards (with each board having 4 sockets & some
memory), and one or more IO assemblies, each of which can have a bunch
of PCI cards in them. They share the repeater boards & power, but not
much else (and there is a partitioning mode where I think even
repeaters are not shared). A 6800 can have up to 4 domains (which I
think is purely because there are only 4 I/O assemblies).
For almost all purposes, domains are distinct machines - each domain
can be individually powered on or off, runs its own Solaris instance,
has its own boot disks, network interfaces and so on. Domains on the
same system have no privileged relationship with each other. Solaris
does support dynamic reconfiguration of domains (with fewer
restrictions for more recent releases), and using this you can, for
instance, remove a system board from a running domain, and allocate it
to another domain on the same underlying machine, with no reboot
required for either Solaris instance. However this is probably not
something you'd do on a very frequent basis. It's obviously useful for
moving computational & memory resources between domains, and also for
replacing broken boards. You can also do tricks like upgrading the
memory in a domain by configuring a board out of it, powering the board
off, removing it, upgrading memory, powering back on and replacing in
the domain.
Also someone asked me that if a server has 3 domains and if 1 domain
fails then how the other domain takes over??Is this somewhat related
DNS??
This is something you'd expect to do with some kind of clustering
system. Generally you'd do this between domains on a different
underlying box, to avoid single points of failure. Clustering systems
keep an eye on the machines and arrange for services to be moved from
failed machines. The implementation is fairly non-trivial because
there are bad failure cases. Veritas cluster server is the most common
one on Solaris I think - Sun also have a cluster solution which is
(again, I think) less used, but I think is now free, which is cool.
Sun have plenty of information on 6800s & similar on the net - look at
http://www.sun.com/products-n-solutions/hardware/docs/Servers/Midrange_Servers/sun_fire_6800/index.html
for a good starting point.
--tim
.
- References:
- Sun Fire 6800
- From: vinsidus@xxxxxxxxx
- Sun Fire 6800
- Prev by Date: Re: Strange error in gcc make install
- Next by Date: Re: pkgadd command (specific directory)
- Previous by thread: Re: Sun Fire 6800
- Next by thread: Re: WHERE is Solaris looking for VTOC? was Re: Installed non-Sun hard drive into Sun Blade 100
- Index(es):
Relevant Pages
|
