Chapter 8. IBM BladeCenter HX5 377
installed option rather than having to look at the entire server to try to find a good starting
point during problem determination.
8.2 Planning to scale: Prerequisites
As described in 5.8, “Scalability” on page 188, the HX5 blade architecture allows for three
scalable configurations:
Single-node server: A single HX5 server with two processor sockets
Two-node server: Two HX5 servers connected to form a single image 4-socket server
HX5+MAX5: A single HX5 server with two processor sockets, plus a MAX5 memory
expansion blade that is attached to the server.
When making the decision to scale with either a MAX5 or by adding a second blade, you must
meet several key prerequisites before proceeding:
Processors supported and requirements to scale
Minimum memory requirement
Required firmware of each blade and the AMM
We describe these prerequisites in the following sections.
8.2.1 Processors supported and requirements to scale
Two-node configurations can include four processors (two in each node) or two processors
(one in each node). When implementing a 4-processor configuration, all processors must be
identical and can be any of the supported Intel Xeon 7500 processors that are listed in 5.9,
“Processor options” on page 192. Intel Xeon 6500 series processors are not supported in
4-processor configurations. When implementing a 2-node configuration with one processor in
each node, both processors must be identical; however, any of the Xeon 7500 or Xeon 6500
series processors that are listed in 5.9, “Processor options” on page 192 are supported.
If you install two Xeon 6500 processors in either a 1-node or 2-node configuration and then
later decide to upgrade to four processors in a 2-node configuration, you must replace the
Xeon 6500 processors with Xeon 7500 processors, because Xeon 6500 processors are not
designed to scale to 4-way.
Figure 8-5 shows an example of an error that you will see in the error log of the AMM if the
processors do not match when trying to scale.
Figure 8-5 Processor mismatch error when trying to scale a 2-node
The HX5+MAX5 configurations support all of the processors that are listed in 5.9, “Processor
options” on page 192.
8.2.2 Minimum memory requirement
For a 2-node configuration, the minimum required amount of memory is four DIMMs, two on
each blade in slots 1 and 4. However, we do not recommend this amount of memory for
performance reasons.
To Next Page
Loading...
Need help?
General