130 Sun Fire V890 Server Owner’s Guide • September 2004
Caution – A qualified service technician can hot-plug any standard PCI card that
complies with PCI Hot-Plug Specification Revision 1.1, provided a suitable software
driver exists for the Solaris OS, and the driver supports hot-plugging as described in
the Sun Fire V890 Dynamic Reconfiguration User’s Guide. The Sun Fire V890 system
must be running the Solaris 8 7/01 operating system or a subsequent release that
supports Sun Fire V890 PCI hot-plug operations. Do not attempt to hot-plug a PCI
card until you are certain that its device drivers provide the proper support;
otherwise, you may cause a system panic. For a list of Sun PCI cards and device
drivers that support PCI hot-plug operations, see the Sun Fire V890 Server Product
Notes.
Note – DR works in conjunction with (but does not require) multipathing software.
You can use multipathing software to switch I/O operations from one I/O controller
to another to prepare for DR operations. With a combination of DR and multipathing
software, a qualified service technician can remove, replace, or deactivate a PCI
controller card with little or no interruption to system operation. Note that this
requires redundant hardware; that is, the system must contain an alternate I/O
controller that is connected to the same device(s) as the card being removed or
replaced. The alternate controller must reside on a different PCI card or be
integrated into the Sun Fire V890 system motherboard or I/O board. For additional
details, see “About Multipathing Software” on page 131.
PCI Hot-Plug User Interfaces
There are two different methods for performing PCI hot-plug operations on
Sun Fire V890 systems:
■ Push-button method
■ Command-line method
The push-button method relies on push buttons and status LEDs located near each
PCI slot. A qualified service technician can initiate a PCI hot-plug operation by
pressing the push button for the corresponding slot. The command-line method lets
a qualified service technician initiate PCI hot-plug operations via a remote login
session, an RSC console, or a locally attached console. This method involves the
Solaris cfgadm(1) command.
Both hot-plug methods make use of the status LEDs located near each PCI slot.
These LEDs indicate where and when it is safe to insert or remove a card, and also
show whether the operation has succeeded or failed. For additional details on
hot-plug status LEDs, see “About PCI Slot LEDs” on page 143.
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