Installing the Card Into a Server
Related Information
■
“Remove an Existing Card From a Server” on page 31
Installing the Card Into a Server
Follow the instructions in the following sections to install or replace the Sun Flash Accelerator
F80 PCIe Card.
Note -
For specific PCIe card installation instructions, see your server service manual and
product notes.
■
“Card Optimization Guidelines” on page 26
■
“Install a New Card” on page 27
■
“Remove an Existing Card From a Server” on page 31
Card Optimization Guidelines
Block size can be configured through a server OS or file system, and is set to a default size with
Oracle databases.
The Sun Flash Accelerator F80 PCIe Card is designed to provide best performance for data
transfers that are multiples of 8k size, and using addresses that are 8k aligned. Partitions should
be aligned to start on 8k boundaries.
Oracle Solaris OS automatically ensures 8k alignment when the default
SMI
label type is
selected. If a label of type
EFI
is desired, care must be taken to specify and ensure 8k alignment:
the default start sector of 34 for
EFI
labels is not an 8k aligned value. Use the
partition
subcommand of the Solaris
format
command to change the start sector to 48, or any other 8k
aligned value. Note that there are 512B per sector.
The ZFS file system automatically aligns partitions to start on 8k boundaries when a full disk
is allocated to ZFS (recommended). If you allocate individual
EFI
partitions to a ZFS pool,
ensure the partition is 8k-aligned as discussed above. For optimal performance of ZFS with the
Sun Flash Accelerator F80 PCIe Card, refer to the
ZFS Best Practices Guide
and the
ZFS Evil
Tuning Guide
.
26
Sun Flash Accelerator F80 PCIe Card User's Guide • December 2013