A new CAM 6.5 firmware baseline is now available. The release includes a maintenance update to the 2500 series firmware and support for 1.0TB 750GB 500GB 250GB Seagate Moose SATA disks.
The release is available through the following patches --
142798-01 Solaris (including OpenSolaris)
142799-01 Windows
142800-01 Linux
Last week Sun announced the 6180 array and the latest CAM release supports this new device --
The Sun Storage Common Array Manager software for the Sun Storage 6180 Array lowers storage management costs with centralized management. It provides run-anywhere flexibility and a single interface across the entire Sun Storage Modular Line. With fully integrated data services such as storage domains, data snapshot, data volume copy, and data mirror features, the Sun Storage Common Array Manager software improves storage utilization with configuration flexibility.
The Sun Storage F5100 Flash Array was announced over the weekend at Oracle OpenWorld. CAM is the official management software for this device. As mentioned on the product features page --
The Sun Storage F5100 comes with Sun StorageTek Common Array Manager software, which provides a common, simple-to-use interface for all your Sun Storage arrays. The software takes the complexity out of storage management, enabling you to accelerate deployment, simplify your environment, and improve utilization.
The Common Array Manager Service Advisor also offers proactive health checking and supports quick time to service. System error messages are connected directly to specific repair procedures in Sun's knowledge base, making common repairs simple and easy.
A Windows patch for CAM 6.5.0 has been released and can be picked up here.
The patch fixes proxy data host firmware upgrade and localization issues that only occur on Windows.
CAM 6.5.0 has been released and can be downloaded from here.
What's New in this Release
A frequent support issue we get with Solaris 10 management hosts is the user can not access the webconsole remotely. When they point their browser to the URL https://<management host hostname or IP address>:6789 the browser returns with "Failed to Connect" (Firefox) or "Can not display the webpage" (IE). The reason this happens is because beginning with Solaris 10 11/06 (Update 3) the Secure by Default Network Profile was introduced. This profile hardens the default configuration of Solaris systems by either disabling network services or limiting them to local requests only. In the case of the Java Web Console it is configured to respond to local requests only. This is what is behind the browser connection failure messages. Enabling Remote Access to the Java Web Console has the procedure for enabling remote access to the webconsole.
A few additional things to point out are
A new patch for CAM 6.4.1 came out last week. The patch includes updated firmware for a new storage array. You can pick up the patch from the Sun StorageTek Common Array Mgr Firmware Updates Patches page.
Another CAM release has gone out the door and can be picked up here.
This release is significant because it includes the much anticipated SAS zoning (a.k.a SAS domain access configuration) feature. You can now control which hosts have access to which disks inside a Sun Storage Expansion Array. It is highly recommended that you read through Chapter 5 of the Sun StorageTek Common Array Manager User Guide for Open Systems (that's a mouth full) and the Using Access Configuration Features section in the release notes to get a basic understanding of this feature and the best practices for using it.
This release is also a recommended upgrade for RAID array users, especially those using the Sun StorageTek 2500 arrays, who are using array firmware 7.x or later.
Some additional important notes about this release:
If you attempt to install CAM 6.4.0 or earlier into an OpenSolaris zone you'll find that the installer will exit with the following error
In a non-global zone. You must manually install the following patches in the global zone first:
119043-09
126539-01
What's going on here is that the version of the Sun Web Console that is bundled with CAM (version 3.0.5) requires these patches on Solaris 10 x86. The CAM installer logic assumes that a zone capable host is a Solaris 10 host (this assumption will be removed in the future) and since these patches can only be applied in the global zone it insists that they be applied before installing CAM.
To get around this you can modify line 170 in the RunMe.bin script. That line reads
found=0
If changed to
found=1
you can then install CAM into a zone. As mentioned before in this post, it is only possible to get Sun Web Console 3.0.2 on OpenSolaris.
CAM uses the Sun Java Web Console to host its web application. Version 3.0.5 is bundled into the CAM distribution and is installed as required (Solaris 10 includes version 3.1 which CAM will use). In the case of OpenSolaris, which does not include any version of the Sun Java Web Console, you will end up with version 3.0.2 and not 3.0.5 after installing CAM. This is due to the fact that version 3.0.5 was actually a patch release. That is you first install 3.0.2 and then apply a patch to get to 3.0.5. Patches were released for Solaris 8, Solaris 9 and Solaris 10 --
Since there are no patches for OpenSolaris there is no way to get to version 3.0.5 on an OpenSolaris host when installing CAM. In a future release we will address this and will allow the same version of the console to be installed on an OpenSolaris host.
It should be noted that Sun Web Java Console 3.0.2 does have a security vulnerability which is described here.
Although not officially supported, CAM can be installed and used on OpenSolaris. (CAM 6.2 and earlier can not be installed in graphical mode since the installer uses java 1.4 which requires the Motif libraries; the other install modes do work). We have released patches for CAM and it was believed that since OpenSolaris includes the SVR4 patch utilities that the Solaris patches could be applied on an OpenSolaris host. Unfortunately, OpenSolaris only comes with ksh93 and the patch utilities were written using ksh88. Due to incompatbilities between ksh93 and ksh88 the patch utilities will not work. CAM is unbundled software that is released for Solaris, Windows and Linux and we intially want to release one distribution that can be used on both Solaris and OpenSolaris.
One option to get CAM or any other Solaris patches for unbundled software installed on OpenSolaris would be to get a copy of ksh88 and then use it with the patchadd script. Here are steps that worked sucessfully on 2008.11:
For example. these commands can be used to apply the CAM 6.2 patches on a OpenSolaris 2008.11 host:
# pkgadd -R <path to tool root> -d <path to Solaris 10 install media>/Solaris 10/Product SUNWcsu
# <path to tool root>/usr/bin/ksh /usr/lib/patch/patchadd 140064-02
...
# <path to tool root>/usr/bin/ksh /usr/lib/patch/patchadd 140060-02
...
Long term this won't be a workable solution since the patch utilities are being removed from OpenSolaris. Ultimately CAM will be made available from an IPS repository (there are a few factors that prevent this today namely the CAM webapp is written to run in the Sun Java Web Console which is not present in OpenSolaris).
UPDATE (05/11/09):
Even with ksh88 the patch utilities may still not work. On a 2008.11 host with a large ZFS root (~ 114 GB), the following is seen:
Insufficient space in /var/sadm/pkg to save old files Space required in kilobytes 132579 Space available in kilobytes 1168640410 patchadd terminating
Without having looked at the patchadd script some sort of integer overflow is probably occuring which causes the space check to fail.
Now that CAM 6.4.0 has come out, which is a new, full package release, our recommendation is to use that version of CAM on OpenSolaris instead of CAM 6.2.
The next release of CAM, 6.4.0, is now available from Sun Downloads here.
This release adds the following features:
This release is a strongly recommended upgrade for the 6000 array series.
Do not install CAM 6.4 to manage the SUN STORAGE J4200, J4400, J4500 or Sun Blade 6000 products. Critical PATCHES for CAM 6.4.0 that provide support for these products will be available on SunSolve in May 2009. Until then, please remain on your current version of CAM.