Sun V240 Servers

stuie · 18 Oct 2012 at 12:44

They are getting rid some of these from my dads work dont know the full specs as yet but hes managed to grab one of them.

I dont really have any experience in sun kit but as it was free i thought id have a play, Ive looked on a few sights and it looks like they are quite old now ddr1 spec boxes scsi interfaces and only pci no pcix. What sort of performance can I expect out of this i'm not planning on playing games or anything with it but was wondering if it was worth slapping a raid card in with a load of disks but ive already got my q6600 available to run as a file server

Have I basically got something thats decent and worth something or is it just scrap?

PistolPete · 18 Oct 2012 at 13:11

These are Sparc processor servers and not x86 so you'll need to have Solaris or similar on it. Not sure what you're experience is with this so that may mean they are useless to you.

stuie · 18 Oct 2012 at 13:36

ive got general linux experience mostly SUSE and UBUNTU and there is a sparc version of that along with red hat and fedora options too.

Although I dont know a great deal about spark cpus in general, ive done a bit of research but there doesnt appear to be a "dummies guide" im up on current x86-64 tech but dont know how that compares if at all to sparc stuff

blueboy2001 · 19 Oct 2012 at 22:30

These are old now and are practically worthless in monetary terms. It'll have 2 UltraSPARC IIIi's at either 1200 or 1500MHz - these are only single core chips. Probably 4Gb or 8Gb RAM.

By today's standards they are not very powerful.

That said, we still have a v240, and an even older single CPU 280R, in day to day use running Oracle databases and a couple of other apps on Solaris. They work fine servicing about 50 users on a day to day basis and have been, dare I say it, supremely reliable. No doubt they'll be a smouldering pile of bits on the floor when I get in on Monday! I'm just about to order a new SPARC T4-1 as a replacement for both of these boxes. The 280R dates from around 2004 and we bought the v240 in 2005.

I've done some admittedly unscientific tests, but identical CPU-intensive Oracle database jobs on the same database content complete faster in a Solaris 10 virtual machine allocated with 2 vCPU's from a 2.5GHz Core2 Quad and 2Gb RAM, whilst host box is running Windows 7 and I'm watching streaming video, than they do on the v240! I use this Solaris x86 VM to test out major database jobs - if I run anything particularly heavy on the test database on the v240 during the day, the users will moan things are running slowly.

I wouldn't want one at home - they're big, heavy, noisy and draw lots of power. If you want to learn Solaris, run the x86 version in a VM on your PC. If you want to run Linux, get a cheap/free second hand PC. If you want a disk array, get a NAS. SCSI disks to fit a v240 will be expensive and limited in capacity by today's standards.

We'll be throwing out our v240, 280R, v480 and 2x v880's soon. That's probably upwards of £150k of Sun kit at what we paid for it new! I won't be offering to take any of them home.