Sun rocks for making the ILOM standard on the X4×00 SunFires. That said, my experience with it needs a serious vitamin B shot.

What rocks?

  • Beautiful web UI. I wish Slashdot looked as good as this thing. Its slick to use…though I do find it humorous to see .ASP extensions in a Sun product.

  • Power cycling works wonderfully. Thanks for not making us monkeys  issue two commands to power cycle the box. Sometimes our opposable thumbs lock up. ;-)

  • Remote BIOS upgrade won't turn your box into a glorified paper weight. It takes a little while to complete, but the BIOS upgrades through the ILOM work like a charm every time.

What doesn't?

  • KVM over IP is one of those great things like automatic transmissions that makes gettin' through the day bearable. Unfortunately, the ILOM seems to have taken its cues from the Automatic Safety Transmission of the 1930s. The major problem we're experiencing is with the video. It starts smoother than a diamond roller bearing, and over the next 20 minutes the frame rate degrades to about 1 every 10 seconds. You might think restarting the Java client would
    fix the issue…but you'd be wrong. The only thing that seems to fix the issue is reseting the ILOM…which very helpfully also resets the system. Needs work. (We noticed the problem both with rev 6464 and 10664 of the ILOM firmware).

  • What sets a truly great ILO card apart? In my not so humble opinion, its the ability to remotely mount removable storage. So I thought we had a definite ringer here. Unfortunately, whatever causes the ILOM's video to cut out after 20 minutes also starts affecting the remote removable storage. The Solaris 10 installer lost access to the ISO on my laptop after about 25 minutes. After I cleaned up my Coke off the wall, I gave up on the ILOM and hooked it up to our Raritan Dominion KVM over IP.

 Now there's a lot to love about the ILOM…or will be once some of the more glaring show-stoppers get resolved. One of the more interesting things that happens is that as the frame rate of the video degrades, so does the performance of the web UI. It only recovers after an ILOM reset. However, in a cruel twist of fate, even though the video is unusable, it appears that keystrokes and mouse movements get translated at wire speed no matter what. Got some strange looks when I was using the mouse and keyboard
of my laptop to drive the X4100 I had a SVGA monitor jacked into.

Despite all the bugs, there's a very good foundation here. In all fairness, I've had a lot of the same problems with HP's iLO. For a first crack, the ILOM is darn good. I'm hopeful the next firmware patch will make the ILOM more akin to an Acura six-speed.

Technorati Tags: , , ,