Sun Microsystems X6450 manual Compact Flash Drive

■Installing the operating system on a remote drive, which might be in the chassis (connected through the SAS-NEM module to a Sun Blade 6000 Disk Module) or outside the chassis, in a storage device such as a SAN. See “Connecting to SAS Devices” on page 7 and “Connecting to Exterior Storage Devices Using a Fibre Channel Connection” on page 10

The following sections describe methods of configuring remote drives:

■“Connecting to SAS Devices” on page 7.

■“Connecting to Exterior Storage Devices Using a Fibre Channel Connection” on page 10.

After you have configured one or more remote drives, you can proceed with the operating system installation. From the point of view of the operating system installation, when remote drives are installed and configured correctly, they operate the same as local drives. They should appear in the list when the operating system installation procedure queries for where to install the operating system.

If the operating system installation procedure requires you to select a boot device in the BIOS, see “Accessing BIOS Configuration Utilities and Selecting a Boot Device” on page 13.

Compact Flash Drive

The Sun Blade X6450 is equipped with a compact flash device that can support some operating systems. It is the only local option for installing an operating system.

The following operating systems support booting from compact flash:

■S10 U4 (64-bit) or later

■RHEL4.6 (32/64-bit) or later

■RHEL5.0 (64-bit) or later

■SLES9Sp4 (64-bit)

■SLES10 sp1 (64-bit) or later

■VMware ESX 3.0.2+

■Windows 2003 32- and 64-bit

The compact flash drive supports a finite number of writes before its performance degrades. You can mitigate the limited number of writes by configuring it to redirect the log files (the /var and /tmp directories) to another location. See your operating system documentation for details.

6 Sun Blade X6450 Server Module Installation Guide • September 2008