SPARCed.org blogsberg

If you asked me what my current job was, I would probably answer something along the lines of "I create and destroy partitions on Power5
systems for a living" and it's true. On an average week, I install between 10 and 40 partitions spread across several systems.

If you've got that kind of work to do, you wouldn't want to spend your time clicking your way through some gruesame application like
WebSM.. And I can do without it as well.

But I haven't found much help on the net, so I have decided to make a blog entry with my HMC commandline cheat sheet which should get
you on the way to partitioning IBM pSeries systems without WebSM

This article might be useful to people from outside Germany, so I used the chance to write something up in English again.

My old rootserver has gotten a little out of date lately with its 1.2GHz Celeron CPU, 40GB harddrive and, worst of all, only 256MB of RAM, things were getting a little crammed there. It was time to rent a new server and Strato was one of the first providers to include unlimited traffic in their offers and therefore got the deal.

So, having that box set up nicely by Strato was a nice idea(they even mirror the harddisks for you), but I rented this machine with a friend who plans to run some Java applications on it and in my opinion, you can't beat Java on Solaris. It might just be my very subjective impression, but I've always had the feeling, Java applications run a little "smoother" on Solaris machines, especially when there's a SPARC CPU in it.

So, I wanted to try out Solaris on my new rootserver and first of all, I've had a look if someone already did it.. Installing operating systems without the ability to insert or change CDs isn't always easy, but I haven't found any decent guide on how to do this, only someone who started one, but didn't finish or even include the nasty bits.

Then an idea struck me: Why not install Solaris in a virtual machine..

With XEN mentioned everywhere and remote console access, it should even make a nice way to load up CDs, power on and off the Solaris "machine" with a serial administration console to a non-networked XEN installation and the network routed to the Solaris domain.

But that was a no-go, because Solaris cannot handle XEN block devices (yet).
To cut this short: VMware server was just released with the possibility to assign a physical disk to the virtual machine, use ISO images and.. install Solaris(and discard VMWare afterwards).

And this is what I did..