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Sun SPARC[R] Enterprise M8000/M9000 Servers (OPL): How to make the platform's CD-RW/DVD-RW drive available to your domain, to boot from or to install software

In this Document

Goal

Solution

References

Applies to:

Goal

 This document will summarize how to make the platform's  CD-RW/DVD-RW drive available to your domain on a Sun SPARC[R] Enterprise M8000/M9000 Servers (OPL) . The document will show which device you need to use to boot from the  CD-RW/DVD-RW drive, and how the CD-RW/DVD-RW drive shows up in Solaris.

Solution

The CD-RW/DVD-RW drive unit and the tape drive unit is mounted in the M8000 cabinet, the M9000 base cabinet and in the M9000 expansion cabinet, if present. Each CD-RW/DVD-RW drive unit and the tape drive unit can be connected only to a domain within the cabinet in which the  drive is mounted. The remainder of this document will show examples from a Sun SPARC[R] Enterprise M9000-32 Server. This document is a summary of available information in the various public documents, available in the Oracle SPARC M-Series Servers documentation library. For further details , please visit those documents.

On M8000/M9000 servers each IOU can contain one or more IOUA cards. An IOU card is a PCIe Host Bus Adapter that provides access to internal devices installed at specific locations, amongst which the  CD-RW/DVD-RW drive. To be able to assign the CD-RW/DVD-RW drive to your domain, you can check the output of the XSCF command cfgdevice -l to find out at which locations your platform has IOUA cards, and to find out if the CD-RW/DVD-RW drive is in use. The online XSCF manual page of the cfgdevice command has multiple examples of the use of the cfgdevice command.

To start, you need to find out if the CD-RW/DVD-RW drive is already in use by any domain. To check this, run the command cfgdevice -l on the active XSCF.

The example above tells us the platform does have IOUA cards in IOU#1-PCI#0, IOU#1-PCI#4, IOU#3-PCI#0, IOU#5-PCI#0 and IOU#7-PCI#0. The CD-RW/DVD-RW drive is in use by the domain that contains XSB#01-0. The SAS-status could show more locations with enable up, which means the Solaris entity that contains that location is ready for the CD-RW/DVD-RW drive to be assigned to that location. You will however only see one single IOU/SAS status being reported enable up at any one time. The CD-RW/DVD-RW drive can only be assign to one single IOUA card at any one time.

If you need to change the current connection of the CD-RW/DVD-RW drive, first make sure to stop all usage of the CD-RW/DVD-RW drive on the domain that is currently using the CD-RW/DVD-RW drive. Unmount the used file system, and run the appropriate Solaris commands, as described in To Disconnect a CD-RW/DVD-RW Drive or Tape Drive While the Oracle Solaris OS Is Running on a High-End Server, on page 69 of the SPARC Enterprise Mx000 Servers Administration Guide • June 2012. After stopping all access to the CD-RW/DVD-RW drive, run the necessary cfgdevice command, to assign the CD-RW/DVD-RW drive to a different location ( cfgadm -c <attach|detach> -p <portno> ), as described in the online XSCF manual page of the cfgdevice command . First detach the CD-RW/DVD-RW drive from its current location, and then attach is to the desired location. Then run the appropriate Solaris commands, as described in To Attach a CD-RW/DVD-RW Drive or Tape Drive While the Oracle Solaris OS Is Running on a High-End Server, on page 68 of the SPARC Enterprise Mx000 Servers Administration Guide • June 2012.

When looking at the domain that contains XSB#01, we do see the CD-RW/DVD-RW drive show up in the output of the cfgadm command output, and we do see the Removable Volume Management software has mounted the DVD that is in the drive.

Now we move on, to how this all looks at the Open Boot Prompt (OBP) , also knowns as the OK-prompt. Here it does matter what the domain's Logical System Board (LSB) numbers are, because the LSB number is part of the device path to the CD-RW/DVD-RW drive. In this example we are using domain 7, which only consists of the uni-mode eXtendend System Board (XSB) 01-0. We have assigned LSB number 15 to it, for the purpose of showing what did does to the device path. After configuring the domain to stop at the OK-prompt, we have powered it on. Let's have a look at the available devices.

  
So, to recap, we had connected the CD-RW/DVD-RW drive to XSB#01-0, using LSB number 15. If we use the I/O Device Mapping on High-End Servers table, as described on page 106 of the SPARC Enterprise Mx000 Servers Administration Guide • June 2012, we can see the CD-RW/DVD-RW drive can be expected in the probe-scsi-all output under pci@f0,600000, where f is the hexadecimal representation of our LSB number 15. And so it does. When looking at the devalias output, we see that the cdrom alias is set accordingly.

We are all set. Running boot cdrom will now attempt to boot the domain from the media that is currently present in the CD-RW/DVD-RW drive.

References

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