A walkthrough to the Sun Storage Simulator - Part 1: Initial Config

I hope that you won´t say after this walkthrough, that Sun can’t develop a decent GUI. I´ve used the VMware based storage simulator for the Sun Storage 7000 series to create a short walkthrough to the installation of an Fishworks based system. When you start up the simulator, the output starts similar to an ordinary Solaris system. But shortly afterwards there are some differences.

You have to do some initial configuration to integrate the appliance in your network. So press simply any key to get to an character based configuration dialog. It´s the only one in the configuration of the device.

So just type in a hostname, a DNS domain. I´ve got my IP configuration via DHCP, so was able to keep it and afterwards you have to configure a password. This ist the password for the Superuser of the device.

There is an console, but you don´t have to use it. There is a much better way to control the device. We will use the Web-GUI.

We have to use the username root and the password the have typed in at the initial configuration.

After the successful login, we have to complete the initial configuration. So far we have just an IP-Address on a single interface. I will keep it this way, but i give it a different name. So i have to click onto the pencil behind Untitled Interface in this dialog.

The main window fades and you see a new dialog. To ease things for this tutorial, i will just change the name of the Interface to Main Interface. Afterwards i have to click to the Apply button and afterwars to the commit button of the main window. This will lead you to the next step of the configuration

Just type in your DNS configuration. I´ve just pressed commit on this page.

Now enter your NTP config for time synchronization. The GUI checks if the entered server is available and gives you a message if the system can’t sync with the server. Commit again.

We have to configure an filer, so one important step is to get our user databases to this server. In this dialog you can integrate your system into exisiting NIS, LDAP or Actice Directory Repositoies. As i doesn´t have such an Server on my MacBook Pro i will skip this step. So just click on the commit button.

This screen is for the Remote Support functions like Service Tags or Phone home. I´ve skipped the configuration in this walk-through but registering the appliance with it´s service tags is a useful tool to keep an inventory of assets supporting service tags (but that’s a different story). Again … just press the commit button.

Now we get to the interesting part of a storage system: Obviously the disks. We can choose here an data profile. Do you wan´t to RAID-1 … do you wan´t a double-parity RAID. You can choose it here and the device gives you even a short explanation about the characteristics of your choice.

I don´t want double parity RAID, i want to use RAID1 so i choose “mirrored”. Afterwards just press the commit button and your storage will be initialized.

As ZFS doesn´t need a long time to initialize your storage, it comes back soon and gives you a short status of your device. This is the last step of your configuration. Just press commit again and you are done.

Mission completed, the appliance gives you an nice “Welcome!”-screen with some direction what you you can do now. But that´s a different walkthrough ;)