The driver needed for the onboard 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE) network interface controller (X540) as used in the Sun Server X3-2L is not available in the general availability release of SLES 11 SP1.

• SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 11 SP1

• Releases 1.0, 1.1, and 1.2

Do either of the following:

• Use Oracle System Assistant to install the SLES 11 SP1 operating system. Oracle System Assistant includes the required upgraded Intel 10GbE ixgbe driver and installs it for you automatically.

• Download and install an upgraded Intel 10GbE ixgbe driver. For instructions for downloading and installing the upgraded ixgbe driver, see “Configuring the SLES 11 SP1 Operating System Software to Support Network Connections” in the Sun Server X3-2L Installation Guide for Linux Operating Systems.

If you choose to download and install the upgraded ixgbe driver manually, you can install the driver after you have installed and configured the SLES 11 SP1 operating system or during the initial install. You also have the option of incorporating the upgraded ixgbe driver file(s) into a PXE configuration that supports completely automated network installs.

For the Oracle Linux 5.8 Red Hat compatible kernel, the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5.8 kernel, and the SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 11 Base Install, Service Pack 1 kernel, with certain hardware configurations under these kernels, nuisance error messages are generated by the kernel and the smartd service.

Systems using these kernels with smartd monitoring of the block device enabled, and configured with an internal Sun Storage 6 Gb SAS PCIe RAID host bus adapter (HBA) that is connected to a SATA drive (such as the 7101423 100GB Solid State SATA Drive) and running in RAW JBOD mode, might find multiple error messages on the system console or in /var/log/ messages that look like the following:

Feb 9 18:24:58 X4270M3host kernel: [9108.314218] sd 0:0:0:0 [sda] Sense Key: Recovered Error [current][descriptor]

Feb 9 18:24:58 X4270M3host kernel: [9108.314226] Descriptor sense data with sense descriptors (in hex):

Feb 9 18:24:58 X4270M3host kernel: [9108.314229] 72 01 00 1d 00 00 00 0e 09 0c 00 00 00 00 00 00

Feb 9 18:24:58 X4270M3host kernel: [9108.314240] 00 4f 00 c2 00 50

Feb 9 18:24:58 X4270M3host kernel: [9108.314246] sd 0:0:0:0 [sda] Add. Sense ATA pass through information available.

• Sun Storage 6 Gb SAS PCIe RAID HBA, Internal option card (SGX-SAS6-R-INT-Z and SG-SAS6-R-INT-Z)

• Oracle Linux 5.8 with Red Hat compatible kernel

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5.8

• SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 11 SP1

• Releases 1.0, 1.1, and 1.2

The impact of this condition is minimal. The log messages are alarming, but there is no error condition. For Oracle Linux 5.8 using the Red Hat compatible kernel and RHEL 5.8, and SLES 11 SP1, you can choose to ignore the messages, disable smartd, or update to the latest errata kernel.

• Disable smartd monitoring of all JBOD SATA drives under the Sun Storage 6 Gb SAS PCIe RAID HBA controllers. Use the smartctl command to disable monitoring of the drive and to verify drive monitor status.

• Update to the latest errata kernel from SUSE. The new SUSE kernels have a patch applied to quiet this message. You can find the errata kernel on the SUSE Support Site at: http://download.novell.com/. Errata kernels are usually restricted to those with a valid SUSE support contract.

DISABLE: The following example disables smartctl service monitoring of block device /dev/sda.

X4270M3host3 host:~ # smartctl -s off /dev/sda

smartctl 5.39 2008-10-24 22:33 [x86_64-suse-linux-gnu] (openSUSE RPM)

Copyright (C) 2002-8 by Bruce Allen, http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net

SMART Disabled. Use option -s with argument ‘on' to enable it.

VERIFY: this example verifies the smartd monitoring status of device /dev/sdb

X4270M3host~ # smartctl -i /dev/sda

smartctl 5.39 2008-10-24 22:33 [x86_64-suse-linux-gnu] (openSUSE RPM)

===START of INFORMATION SECTION===

Device Model: INTEL SSDSA2BZ100G3S

Serial Number: CVLV11830001100AGN

Firmware Version: 6PS10362

User Capacity: 100,030,242,816 bytes

Device is: Not in smartctl database [for details use: -P showall]

ATA Version is: 8

ATA Standard is: ATA-8-ACS revision 4

Local Time is: Fri Feb 10 09:48:34 2012 EST

SMART support is: Available - device has SMART capability.

SMART support is: disabled

SMART Disabled. Use option -s with argument ‘on' to enable it.

The grub.efi bootloader included with the software distribution does not work with Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) clients.

• Oracle Linux 6.1

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6.1 and 6.2

• Releases 1.0, 1.1, and 1.2

To support UEFI network boot clients, update the Oracle 6.1 distribution grub.efi bootloader package on your PXE boot server. You can obtain updates from Unbreakable Linux Network (ULN) at: http://linux.oracle.com

Oracle VM and some Linux operating system installations can fail on some disk partitions because libparted does not handle some disk partitions correctly.

• Oracle Linux 5.7, 5.8, and 6.1

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5.7, 5.8, and 6.1

• Oracle VM 3.0 and 3.1

• Releases 1.0, 1.1, and 1.2

Do the following:

1. Ensure that the disk on which the virtual machine software or operating system will be installed is clean, with no other operating systems installed.

2. If necessary, use the dd command to clear the disk before installing the operating system.

The driver needed for the 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE) Controller (X540) as used in the Sun Server X3-2L is not available in the general availability release of VMware ESXi 5.0 and 5.0 Update 1.

• VMware ESXi 5.0 and 5.0 Update 1

• Releases 1.0, 1.1, and 1.2

Perform either of the following tasks:

• Add the required driver to the ESXi 5.0 and 5.0 Update 1 installation ISO image.

• Install a PCIe network interface controller (NIC) card in the server that is compatible with the standard download ESXi 5.0 and 5.0 Update 1 ISO image.

For instructions for performing the above tasks, see “Configuring the VMware ESXi Software or the Server Hardware to Support Network Connections” in the Sun Server X3-2L Installation Guide for VMware ESXi.

When the operating system boots and initializes the mpt2sas driver, several AER (application error reporting) errors might appear in dmesg. dmesg displays the content of the Linux system message buffer.

• Oracle VM 3.1.1 and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 11 SP2

• Release 1.2

None. These errors are harmless and can be safely ignored.