Re: solaris 1/6 on Sunfire v245 ?

Okay, so everyone finds it more interesting to discuss the business model and
not the technical issue.

Is it that hard to envision having +300 servers and trying to maintain only a
limited set of OSes on them ? That limited set is provided by a jumpstart
server and because of the limited set we can maintain it better with a 2
yearly patch round - impossibly in an environment where there are too many
OSes.

Business bought 2 SunFire V450's and found they wouldnt jumpstart on the
Solaris 10 image that we as framework providers have rigorously tested once
upon a time. Having to bring a second Solaris 10 image in production just for
these 2 servers would mean weeks of manhours ... see what I am getting at now
?

As for live_upgrade, most of our servers boot from SAN, it's great for Drp
and such but live_upgrade is not something we have tested to be very useful
in our environment.

Either way, when technical knowledge fails people tend to want to profile
their sense of Business accumen instead, but fact of the matter is : no
relevant answers and I guess there won't be any. To bad.

Cheers,
Watchie
btw. Im not their manager, Im the guy that has to get it working.



On Wed, 26 Sep 2007 22:25:55 +0200, Michael Vilain wrote
(in article <vilain-33760F.13255526092007@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>):

In article <0001HW.C3207F660004C18AB019F96F@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
watchie <watchie@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:


Is it possible to get Solaris 1/06 running on a Sunfire v245 , does
anybody
have any experiences trying this ?
The company I work for needs this functionality because we try to maintain
the same Solaris 10 OS image on all servers in order to ease maintenance.

What maintenance? You are years behind Solaris 10 8/07
...
Even if that had worked it would be unsupported. And rightfully so
...

Sorry , my young guru-friend for not keeping our +300 servers up to date
with
the latest version of Solaris 10.
My sysadmin team just seems to prefer to be home at night with their family

and Business doesnt allow them to be brought down during daytime... sigh.

Mind you, it is a technical question in a technical forum so whether or not

it would be 'supported' or not should not lay to heavily on your soul. But
rest assured, with the amount of servers we tend to buy from Sun and
Fujitsu
i'm inclined to think they'll probably give us at least a 'best effort'
should problems ever arise after the faul play.
In fact, they'll be more than happy to come to the conclusion that they
are
indeed geting payed for support on a server they can reject as
unsupported.
And they will smile all the way to the bank when they go to deposit the
support contract money. None of your or my concern however.

Actually, if you're their manager, it most emphatically and essentially
_is_ your concern. Because if you manage to hack Solaris to run on
hardware that it doesn't support, you and your whole team just went into
the Solaris support business. Unless you wave a lot of money in front
of the right faces at SUN corporate, I doubt you'll get any sort of
support for running a version of Solaris on hardware it's not supported
on. I'm sure it can be done as a time and materials project by be
prepared with a large can of Vasoline and several changes of underwear.


That said ... maybe someone more forgiving will still find it in their
heart
to give me a few ideas on the topic at hand : is it possible in some way to
boot a SunFire V245 with Solaris 10 1/06. Somehow I would think a few minor
modifications (probably copies of directories from 06/06 ?) should suffice
but which ...

In my attempts I tried to copy /usr/platform/SunFire-V215 from a 6/06 over
to
the jumpstart image of Solaris 1/06 and linked SunFire-V245 to it (as is
the
case with Solaris 6/06).
Did the same in /platform.

My main concern is the generic kernel itself ... I could copy it over from
6/06 but here I clearly need to tred more carefully since there obviously
is
already a /kernel in 1/6 and thererfor just swapping it with a /kernel from
6/06 might be more than Solaris 1/6 can handle.

Does anyone have any experience with this type of open heart surgery ?

Cheers,
Watchie


OK, maybe you are one of those people that likes to push the envelope on
such things. In companies that run production environments where
downtime is a measured metric, that's usually frowned upon. If you're
in an academic or development environment, then messing with hardware
and the kernel may be something you can get away with. Sounds like the
latter. You may have to go with maintaining your own Solaris source
tree to get this to work. Good luck with that.

Alternatively, you could standardize on only machines that run the
version and release of Solaris you've standardized on. Which is easier?
Hacking Solaris to run on hardware Sun doesn't support, figuring out how
to make Solaris run on unsupported hardware and supporting it, or hiring
someone from the Sun Kernel team to do your project.

I think you have this whole thing bass-ackwards.




.

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