Installing Solaris 10 update 4 on Dell PowerEdge 2950
Posted by Sam
I flew into Oklahoma City last night to install Solaris 10 on a new Dell PowerEdge 2950. I've been putting Solaris 10 every where I can because it's features like DTrace, ZFS and Zones blow away anything found on Linux. But installing Solaris on non Sun hardware can be a challenge. I'd checked the HCL and it checked out ok as long as you added the appropriate drivers but I knew there were still probably going to be problems. The Perc controller that Dell uses isn't recognized by the Solaris installer so I first tried to install the LSI drivers, but Solaris still couldn't see the drives. So after a little more searching I found drivers from The University of Queensland and they worked without a hitch. After the install I added the Broadcom NetXtreme II drivers to get the networking support going. The Broadcom drivers installed as expected. So far everything is running great. I guess we'll know for sure once this thing goes into production, but as of right now this looks like a successful Solaris installation.