Automating Initial Setup and Management of Sun Fire V20z and V40z Servers 
by Jacques Bessoudo
June, 2005
Many compute- and network-centric applications can benefit from pools or grids of smaller, horizontally-scaled servers due to their lower initial cost, flexibility, scalability, and performance for certain tasks. However, installing and managing tens or hundreds of servers in a consistent manner can be time consuming and prone to errors that further increase the time required to manage large pools of servers. Fortunately, many administrative tasks can be easily automated using the integrated service processor in the Sun Fire V20z and V40z servers.
There are three areas of setup and management of the Sun Fire V20z and V40z server's service processor that are usually performed manually--where automated scripts can save time and can eliminate errors:
- Service processor setup
- Service processor management
- Server (BIOS) and service processor firmware updates
This article describes a method for helping system administrators save time by automating these processes and running them on multiple systems simultaneously. It details the steps for creating scripts to automate these tasks and run them in parallel and includes examples of several of the more common tasks.
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