In the lab, I had a Sun Blade 6000 chassis with six blades (two each of the X6250, X6220, and T6300 models), two Network Express Modules, and four dual-gigabit Express Modules. This equates to four blades with four gigabit NICs each, and two blades with two gigabit NICs. I worked with a variety of operating systems, from Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.5, CentOS 5, VMware ESX Server 3.0.1 and 3.0.2, to Solaris 10, Windows Server 2003 Standard and R2. I used 32- and 64-bit versions of each. I didn't run into any problems with driver incompatibilities that couldn't be rectified with a few updated drivers, and most of the newer releases found all the hardware without issue, including VMware ESX 3.0.1 on the Intel and AMD blades.

The Bottom Line Sun Blade 6000 Sun Microsystems, sun.com Very Good  8.5 criteria score weight Availability 8 25% Performance 9 20% Management 8 15% Serviceability 9 10% Scalability 9 20% Value 8 10% Cost: Chassis: $4,999, Blades start at $3,695 each Platforms: Solaris, Linux, Windows Server 2003, x86 and x64 Bottom Line: As the little brother to the Sun Blade 8000 series, the 6000 series offers plenty of expansion, and more blade options than any other blade system. With SAS/SATA SFF disk support, optional RAID 0,1,5,10 on the Intel blades, CompactFlash support, and a well-designed expansion card layout, it’s a solid system for a nice price. About our Reviews and Scoring Methodology

Embedded management
One of the features I found very useful on the Sun Blade 8000 chassis was the Chassis Management Module's Web interface. In the 8000 series, you can pull up this module in a Web browser and use it as a clearinghouse of sorts, jumping to any one blade, or several, and getting a graphical overview of the entire chassis. This Web interface isn't available on the 6000 series, however, and is strictly command-line. It's unfortunate to lose that capability.

Each blade has an ILO management card embedded in it, however, that drives like any of the Sun Galaxy server management cards, offering a Web interface with out-of-band power controls and console redirection. The console redirection available in the AMD-based blades, dubbed JavaRConsole, is simply stellar, offering a fully graphical console based on a Java applet that works flawlessly. It offers virtual CD and floppy support and accurate mouse tracking.

I've run it on Mac OS X, Linux, and Windows clients. Unfortunately, the Intel-based blades diverged from JavaRConsole to the Java Remote KVM applet. I had problems getting it to work under anything but Windows and a specific version of Java for Linux, with the applet either failing to load or showing nothing but a blank screen.

With the systems that I did get it to run on, the mouse tracking seemed less stable, multiple sessions in a single applet apparently weren't supported, and the overall experience was not as good as that of the older version found on the Opteron blades. It's curious to me why Sun would "fix" something that wasn't broken, but it seems that it has. Perhaps a firmware update in the future will rectify some of these problems.

Solid performance
I I did wind up with a bad X6220 Opteron blade in the initial shipment, but the replacement Sun shipped worked fine. Some of the benchmarks I ran were real-world FPGA simulations, and my rough calculations showed that the Opteron 2220-based blade outclassed an identically configured Opteron 285 system by about 6 percent, which isn’t bad, but also isn’t a huge margin. However, the performance gains shown by the quad-core Intel blades using those tools was significant, at roughly 20 percent across identical test runs. I did note that when running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 U5 on the Opteron blades, the kacpid process had a tendency to become a runaway, consistently consuming 40-50 percent of one core and not responding to a kill command. I have yet to find a permanent fix for that problem.

Overall, however, testing across the three blade architectures showed solid performance at every level, and the quad-core Intel blades are obviously perfect for virtualization.

It would be nice to see a refresh of these blades with AMD’s Barcelona, and Intel’s Harpertown-based Stoakley platform, but as far as what’s available today, the price/performance mix delivered by the Sun Blade 6000 is outstanding. My quibbles with the lack of a Web-based CMM and the relatively annoying Intel ILO are minor, and hopefully will be addressed in the near future, but the overall package is very impressive.

This story contains updated information in the “Solid performance” section that did not appear in the earlier version previously posted.