[Sunhelp] SunRay's

[Ian Hall-Beyer]

On the topic of sunrays, I work in an environment which is the largest
deployment of sunrays in existence (Sun's Broomfield Campus - we're the
large-scale sunray guinea pigs!).. Current production setup is about
2500 rays on a sunray cluster of 15 fully stocked E5500s. The
clustering works moderately well with the new software, where when you
log on, it will (usually) pick the server with the least load.  

When dealing with rays on such a large scale, though, you become very
aware of how absolutely critical proper network planning and design is
to the operation of these things. 

Yes, it's possible to share the network. No, it's neither recommended
nor supported. The vastly increased load on a shared network is
generally a bad idea, it negatively affects the performance of everyone
involved. Our sunray network is multiple fiber gigabit backbones,
routed into switched 100Mbit segments. 

The reason for the DHCP is that the sunray network currently operates
on an IP network in RFC1918 address space to communicate between the
desktop units and the mothership. 

Authorization/session tokens on the rays are based on the serial number
of the smartcard, or on the unit's MAC address if no card is used. 

-Ian