22 Mar
2010
22 Mar
'10
9:03 a.m.
On Mar 22, 2010, at 11:26 AM, Ray Arachelian wrote:
Nah, you've been told wrong. It runs on pretty much anything
nowadays. It used to need very specific hardware, but that hasn't
been the case for years.
Official Solaris 10 x86 seems to be hard to get fully working on
hardware - On and off, I've been looking at Newegg and copying and
pasting the motherboard models into the bigadmin HW compat webpage and
been getting very few hits. Maybe the hw compat list hasn't been
updated, I don't know...
Well your mistake there is looking at the HCL. ;) I've run it on
several random systems containing random hardware and it nearly
always Just Works. Note that I generally avoid "whiz-bang"
proprietary stuff like monster gamer graphics cards, sixteen-
gazillion-port SATA RAID controllers (I have a SAN here), etc etc
that usually need funky binary-only drivers from the manufacturer.
For standard hardware everything just seems to work, and is rarely
specifically listed in the HCL.
HCLs are almost always extremely conservative. Especially for
"official" Solaris, they'll only list stuff that has been BEATEN TO
DEATH in their testbed networks. As you well know, this isn't
Windows...Solaris goes through an unbelievable amount of prerelease
testing. Far, far more stuff than is listed in the HCL runs just fine.
> I
don't know what Solaris 10's hardware support looks like
these days on x86 machines,
From what I've heard and been told, it's pretty dire. Frankly if I
was told to set up a server without using Linux, I'd probably go
with
one of the BSDs... OTOH, I've been hearing loads of people say
OpenSolaris usually works on far more systems. I'd like to get
real Sol
10, but at some point I'll likely give up and go with Open.
I run "official" solaris exclusively, but will probably explore
OpenSolaris in a virtual machine at some point. With the exception
of VMs, though, I'm exclusively UltraSPARC-based here. (well except
for a couple of Macs) It's true that OpenSolaris supports much more
stuff than "official" Solaris does.
That said, if you've got a specific board
recommendation that I can
get
off newegg that's known to work - something I can stuff upto 4GB of
RAM
and has loads of SATA plugs, gig-ethernet (single is fine), onboard
video (meaning I'm not interested in wasting a slot on a video card
I'll
almost never use), and a few PCI slots (for firewire), I'm all ears.
:-D Since I'd be going with ZFS, I wouldn't want hw raid, I'd rather
let ZFS do the scrubs itself and not have the RAID controller mask
failures from it.
No I'm sorry I don't have a recommendation; I don't really do PC
stuff that much. I can tell you, though, that the machine I most
recently installed Solaris x86 on was an HP DL140 G2. Everything in
it worked perfectly. Also, I'm currently running it at several
customer installations under VMware ESXi (both 3.5 and 4.0), and
under VMware Server.
Oh, and...do yourself a favor, hit eBay for hardware and get high-
end stuff. I'll take industrial-grade stuff (even used...especially
used actually, as it usually comes with useful hardware installed)
over cheap consumer garbage any time. (the aforementioned DL140 G2
cost me about $75...that's lowest-end industrial, but built quite
well nonetheless)
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire
Port Charlotte, FL