What, no watts?
For every system there comes the day when it’s trying to “find a
good home”, and the only reason I didn’t take one of those legendary
E10k to a cozy place at my home was its unmistakable greed for power.
Since its introduction a year ago I have been eager to get my
hands on one of those little miracles designed to reorganize
datacenters and cabinets alike.
My eagerness had seen a bit of dampening when my co-author had been
denied or rather,
never been called back
onto her application for a t&b system earlier this year, but when
announcements
for LDoms surfaced
(Oct 17,
same day), I couldn’t resist and
gave the application process a try of my own.
My to-do list for the trial period includes:
- Top of the list: Give LDoms and the hypervisor a try!
- A handful of experiments on zones, server to zone migration,
clustered zones, failover scenarios between them and their timing,
a different approach of operational rollback of a zone by its
underlying zfs filesystem, and more along these lines.
- More experiments on clustered zones for my Sun Cluster 3
book-in-writing.
- some real-life tests: migration of a handful of “old”
Sun Servers onto the T2000 - how well will it handle
having to deal SunRay services and a number of zones
with productive tasks, and a few for “playing and experiments” ?
I don’t expect any real problems there “for normal use”,
but how well does it scale, and when does it stop to
scale decently?
- Test if the System is able to handle course environments and
act as the server for the participants sessions while supplying
the environment for their labs. This alone would save a
tremendous amount of hardware to lug around between sessions…
Update: The T2000 has been the center of a recent
Solaris 10 intro session.
- Re-run some of the examples for the upcoming second edition of our
German book on OpenSolaris
on the T1 Platform, so Sun isn’t just represented by a few aged
Ultra60s and an IBM xSeries to boot!
(It had been impossible
to get a loaner or remote access during the time of writing —
reaction had been more like “So you’re writing a book on Solaris,
oh really.”)
- Update “Chapter 8”, describing the virtualization and consolidation
concepts of both Sun and IBM to cover Sun LDoms and the Sun hypervisor
in contrast to IBMs LPARs.
- Last but not least - Take the thing along to presentations and
courses held during the trial period, to spread the
“SWaP Virus”
and see how the T2000 does in different setups.
So let’s see. I filed my application for the trial…
Log of experiments
During the (still running) Try and Buy — period, I’ve been able
to complete a few of the tasks I set out to do. While there’s some
kind of diary describing my progress (or lack
thereof), I am putting the individual results on separate pages
each.
Some kind of diary, describing my work as time passes.
- First days, UPS trouble, first experiments…
- Addition of an LSISAS controller, similar(?) to the one that has been
included in the first T2000 systems that didn’t have SAS on board yet.
- Documented experiments on cpu architecture in the
day-by-day notes, added a note on Darren Reeds talk at
Berlin.
The T2000 has been the focus and center of a Solaris intro session.
With a stripped down CDE setup, it was successfully running SunRay
services for all participants, as well as a zone for each.
Most of my time went into
experiments with clustered zones.
Up to now, I am lacking the missing parts to try logical domains
(LDoms)
but here’s the list what I’d like to find out and try.
- By request - added more details on IBM LPARs and a brief comparision
with LDoms to the separate page on LDoms.
Last weekend I got around to doing a Hardware photo
session. Discover the missing DVD Drive LED…
[/T2000]
Final days
T2000 Course Setup
Today I’ve had to start to return the system.
With the machine, there had been a flyer in large print listing the
contact numbers to call for the individual countries.
So this morning, I called the one for Germany, to request the RMA
number and arrange pickup.
- On my 1st try, noone answered, so “Miss Audix”, the voice-mail system, jumped in.
On my 2nd try, I was routed to a sales desk in England from there.
- told that I needed a RMA number for my TnB T2000.
- had to explain the Try and Buy program, and that it was applicable to a T2000.
- was routed to France,
- told that I needed a RMA number for my TnB T2000.
- had to explain the Try and Buy program, and that it was applicable to a T2000.
- was routed to “Reception” (Bavarian, by the sound).
- told that I needed a RMA number for my TnB T2000.
- had to explain the Try and Buy program, and that it was applicable to a T2000.
- was routed to TSC.
- told that I needed a RMA number for my TnB T2000.
- Was asked if the machine was defective. No, it runs like a charm!
- had to explain the Try and Buy program, and that it was applicable to a T2000.
- was asked which number I had been calling initially.
- was asked my own number and promised a callback.
was called back by a german-speaking employee.
- was told to use a web form.
- was given a phone number in the netherlands to coordinate with logistics.
- found the web form, filled it in, pressed the *Initiate Return” button.
- Nothing happened. The web form remained the same, including the text filled in. No hint as to why it might have been rejected.
- There are two ways to submit the form though - One
labelled “initiate return” and one labelled “Submit”. The
latter is included on all web pages on the site, and
refers to the web-page feedback. This can be a little bit
confusing though, when the page itself actually requires
submitting data.
- pressed the “Initiate Return” button again.
- Nothing happened…
- Called the German phone number listed on the web form. The same
I had been calling before. This time, I reached a german speaking
employee.
- was asked for the sales number (not the tnb web number, as in the web form just submitted un?successfully)
- was confirmed that the web form had been submitted twice
- and was quoted the RMA number. 3533072
I’ll be sad to see it go. A year after release, and even with
successors in the queue, it still is an incredible and highly
satisfactory system.
[/T2000]
Friday, Jan 19
T2000 Course Setup
In the web form, I had asked to be contacted for an appointment on pickup.
It’s friday, four days later, and noone has called so far.
The “logistics” telephone number in the netherlands I had been given
is met by an automated reply by my provider stating that it was
invalid.
So I’ll play busy waiting on Monday if/when the system gets picked up.
This weekend I hopefully can have a little try on LDoms, I’ll have
to check if the packages have eventually been released.
So let’s see what this last weekend brings, on Monday the system
will be ready for pickup - I’ll miss my travelling companion of the
last two months, and playing with it.
I would have liked to include it into my university activities, an
“E10k in a pizza box” would have been a nice thing to use in my
courses, especially since I have a new one in preparation that would
suit it perfectly. But since according to the access logs these
web pages have seen little (front page) to no (most sub-pages)
interest from inside Sun, this is quite unlikely to happen.
Maybe now that news of Niagara2 and Rock are surfacing, interest
in the T2000 and the Try and Buy programm is decreasing?
I’ll be keeping an eye on ebay and the occasional E10k passing by.
[/T2000]
