Solaris x86 on a Dell Poweredge 2900

We got a Dell PowerEdge 2900 in with the intention of making it a big ass file server. The basic specs on it are:

• Quad Core Xeon 1.6 (Dell was running a special, free upgrade to the quad core from the dual core)
• 2GB RAM - PC2 5300, 4 x 512mb
• 8 500gb 7200 RPM SATA drives
• Dell PERC 5/i SATA RAID
• 5U Rack chassis

My intent was to install Solaris x86 on the box, setup a ZFS partition, install NFS and Samba and make a nice file server to hold VMWare images and a file dump for the developers. Unfortunately I found out that there are no drivers for the RAID controller for Solaris x86 from Dell, Sun, or LSI.

So, I loaded CentOS 5 (CentOS 4.4 won’t boot on it for some reason - hangs before Grub tries to run), and installed VMWare Server. I’m going to install Solaris x86 under a VM and give it access to a raw partition to hold it’s data. This should keep things speedy. I did read, however, that Solaris x86 will core dump VMWare Server 1.03 if it tries to access a raw partition. Hopefully that won’t be the case for me.

I also need to get Dell OpenManage installed on all of these servers so I can monitor their health and get alerts if they lose a drive in their RAID arrays.

I also need to get the storage network up and running. For now it’s going to be on it’s own VLAN. If I have my druthers, though, it will be on a physically separate switch. All of the new VMWare servers I bought have a 3rd TOE nic that I was going to use just for accessing the NFS server that will host the VM’s images. The PE2900 will probably end up having 2 of it’s interfaces bonded to get 2GB/s access to the LAN.

It’s never ending. At least I got to leave before 7 tonight. Still didn’t get home until 9:15 or so.