Intel

No ZFS Support for EMC Replication Manager

As I originally blogged, I was hoping to use EMC snapshots to perform server-less/network-less backups. EMC provides two main tools for managing snapshots in this type of situation:

  • EMC Replication Manager
  • EMC PowerSnap Networker Module

The PowerSnap Module supposedly automates taking snapshots for the purpose of backups, while Replication Manager supposedly provides a much more robust package.

With Replication Manager you might create a policy to take a snapshot every five minutes, keep the last 10, and use those for backups whenever necessary.

To make a long story short, Replication Manager is useless for LUNs with ZFS. According to EMC, this won't change in the near future. PowerSnap also has no support for taking snapshots of LUNs with ZFS on them so basically EMC has no server-less backup offerings for Solaris with ZFS.

Sun's Predicament

I've been working with Unix for a fairly long time now- about 13 years.

I'll admit that I started with Linux and thought it was light years ahead of SunOS 4.x running on those old SPARC machines- I mean who had heard of SPARC processors? I remember my boss trying to explain to me that even an older SPARC processor was more powerful than a newer Intel Pentium processor. I didn't really believe him. In time, I convinced them to get rid of most of their SPARC/Solaris in favor of the hip, free, and cheap Intel/Linux combination.

Now I see that I couldn't have been more wrong. I realize that SunOS 4.x probably still has features which I don't know how to use properly. When I look at Solaris 10, ZFS, Zones, LDOMS, DTrace, etc. I not really sure you could pay me to work with Linux (that would be soo depressing). That isn't even mentioning the SPARC hardware it runs on- Can any Intel server compare to a T5140???

Solaris 10 doesn't find network card

I recently installed Solaris 10 06/06 x86 on my desktop machine, a Compaq Evo with an onboard Intel 10/100 network card.

At first the Solaris installation seemed to hang while trying to find a network configuration from a nonexistent RPC boot server. In retrospect, I think the problem was that Solaris didn't find an appropriate driver for the card but after waiting a long time, the installation continued skipping the network configuration.