Hi,
I have a Power Edge 2950 server which I acquired a year ago for a home lab using VMware. It had 16GB RAM (using 8 x 2GB DIMMS). The system was rock solid with no errors reported.
Recently I decided to upgrade the memory from 16GB (using 8 x 2GB) to 64GB (using 8 x 8GB) and this caused issues with VMware both when booting from an existing installation on the HDD and via the CD-ROM media. Basically the system is going VERY slow when processing the "s.v000" file and the screen display refresh rate is also slow. Eventually after 40 minutes, all the VMware files are loaded but the machine crashes.
If I take out two banks of the RAM leaving 48GB in the machine, VMware will boot from the HDD and CD-ROM media and is orders of magnitudes faster processing the system files. The screen refresh rate is also noticeably faster.
I have also swapped the RAM modules around and have convinced myself that it is not the RAM. I don't think it is the slot either as the system was working with 16GB RAM before. I have tried this with VMware versions 4.0, 5.0, 5.5 and 6.x all with the same result. This seems to only affect VMware, as booting the server with Linux seems to work with all 64GB RAM!
The BIOS version is 2.2.6 and I have noticed that the latest BIOS is 2.7 - is it worth flashing? Could this fix the problem? Am I in any danger of bricking the server?
I could just leave two sticks of RAM out of the server, but I would like to use all 64GB if possible
Many thanks in advance for the help
Mark.