Configuring ILOM manager on Sun X4540 Thumper

Sun X4540 Thumper storage server provides 48TB hard disk capacity on one server. It has 2 AMD Quad x64 Opteron processors and 32GB of memory. Thumper has 48 hard disk slots. You can use 1TB sata hard disks in each slot. This will give you 48TB hard disk area as you can see in following photo.


You can run Solaris,OpenSolaris, Linux and Windows operating systems on Thumper. Thumper includes Sun Microsystem's ILOM (Sun Integrated Lights Out Manager) manager. You can use ILOM to upgrade your server's firmware, remotely accessing your server's console by using your web browser, modify and see sensors, see hardware components and so on. You can access ILOM by using a serial console,ssh client or a web browser.You need to set an ip address for your ILOM manager if you need to use ssh or a web browser.If you don't have a dhcp server around you'll need to configure your ILOM manager with a static ip address. I have used a serial console connected on Thumpers "Ser MGT" port and on the other side a linux desktop and minicom application. You need to change your minicom settings to 9600 baud rate , 8 data bits, no parity and one stop bit (9600-8-N-1) with no hardware and software flow control.


Yes, that's right, It's Linux :) . Sun ILOM uses embeded Linux. When you connect to ILOM by a serial console you will need to login in by using ILOM's factory default login name "root" and password "changeme". ILOM has a simple built-in command interface. You can use "help" command for details when you logged in ILOM manager. Setting the static ip address of ILOM is simple. I captured the screenshot when I gave one of my local ip addresses to Thumper's ILOM.



After, you commit your static ip network settings settings with "set commitpending=true" command, you need to connect Thumper's "net mgt" ethernet interface to your network.Now, you can access ILOM by using any ssh client or a web browser. My plan is to use OpenSolaris and 48TB ZFS Raid-Z on this storage server and see the results on a production environment :)