One machine that I had always wanted finally came to a pricepoint I saw as a good deal. This machine as expected from this blog's title, a Sun X4600 M2. This machine originally was released in Summer 2008 with the version I have in Late 2008.
Luckily the version I have has 8 AMD Opteron 8384 Quad Core CPUs for a total of 32 cores. Most configurations I had been seeing on eBay are either Dual Core or lowerend Quad Core models. I had the Mushkin 120gb and Western Digital Black hard drives laying around from a NewEgg sale a while back. I should note the SAS Controller on the X4600 is SATA II only, so your SATA III drives will be limited to SATA II's 300mb/sec. One word of caution, during the initial bootup of the system the decibal level get quite extreme. After 10 seconds or so the noise gets to a bearable level, but no where near 'living room' safe levels. As a result, I'm building a little rack in the garage since it stays around 50' all year round and can just use a Powerline adapter to keep it connected to my other machines.
1 Jan 2009 single Sun Fire X 4600 M 2 server of a specific Fire X 4600 M 2 server as possible without exceeding an average CPU Firmware V2.0.2_02. Q: How To Install Megaraid Manager On Sun Fire X4170 M 2 Running On Oracle Vm. Currently, there is only 172 GB of ram installed on the machine, I hope to get it to it’s max of 256 GB of ram within the next week or so. It was an interesting thing getting this running well, and while others may not ever need the information I provide, I will share what I have learned about the machine.
Having purchased a HP Blade thinking I might one day own an HP Blade enclosure, I had 32gb of compatible DDR2 ECC ram laying around. One thing to note, the arrangement of ram is incredibly picky. If you're populating more than 4 DIMMs per CPU module they all need to match. I had at first just used the 16 DIMMs to populate the CPU modules as I found empty slots. Upon turning on the X4600 I was presented with only a fraction of the CPU modules and 16gb of ram (down from the 80gb it should have been). I ended up populating two CPU modules with the 16 2gb sticks I had from the HP Blade and then maxing out another with the original ram.
Operating System wise I chose Windows Server 2012 R2 since I had already started utilizing Hyper-V on my NAS for FreeBSD, OpenSUSE, Windows XP and Solaris VMs. To get Windows Server 2012 R2 installed I had to use an external USB drive and reduce the ECC Ram Settings in the bios to Good. Otherwise after cycling through the onboard SAS controller it would hang.