Communicator e3000 MPE/iX Release 6.5 Express 2 (Software Release C.65.02) (30216-90322)

52 Chapter4

Increases in Limits

MPE/iX Release 6.5 Supports >3.75 GBs of Memory

Dave Snow,

Hewlett-Packard

With the March 2000 shipment of MPE/iX Release 6.5, HP e3000 Servers now support

greater than 3.75 GBs of main memory. This is good news for many applications for which

memory sizes limited the number of users that could be supported or for which had the

application's performance was limited by the 3.75 GB maximum memory size. However,

since the MPE/iX Release 6.5 Communicator only indicates that "some" HP e3000 Servers

will beneﬁt form this increase, clariﬁcations need to be given as to which HP e3000 Servers

will actually beneﬁt from this maximum memory size increase.

HP e3000 Ordering Menus for adding HP e3000 memory used by HP sales people and by

HP e3000 Authorized Resellers already note these limitations.

Only HP e3000 Servers that use the PA8000 or PA8200 processor chips (the PA-RISC 64

bit chips) with MPE/iX Release 6.5 willbe able to use memory sizes greater than 3.75 GBs.

This includes a number of 9x9KS Servers (the 929KS/030, 939KS/030, 979KS, 989KS/x00

and 989KS/x50 Servers) and the 997 Servers.

A number of HP e3000 Servers based on PA7xxx processor chips (the PA-RISC 32 bit

chips) can still use Release 6.5 and many of its added new features (e.g. WebServer

software, ﬁle sizes up to 128 GBs, up to 511 disk spindles, etc.). However these PA7xxx

processor based servers will not be able to support memory sizes greater than 3.75 GBs.

These include the 9x7, 9x8, 939KS, 929KS/020, 939KS/020, 959KS, 969KS/x00,

969KS/x20, 992/990, 995/991 and 996 Servers.

For those HP e3000 9x9KS Servers that do support greater than 3.75 GB of memory, the

upper limit is now 8 GB with MPE/iX Release 6.5. To achieve these large memory sizes,

customers should consider using the 9x9KS 512 MB memory modules, which can be

intermixed with the smaller 9x9KS memory modules.

For the HP e3000 997 Servers, the upper limit is now 16 GB with MPE/iX Release 6.5. To

achieve these large memory sizes, customers should consider using one or two 8 GB

memory carrier cards. This 8 GB memory carrier card can support from one to eight 1 GB

memory modules. The 8 GB memory carrier card can be ﬁeld installed and can be

intermixed with the 128 MB (not actively sold), 256 MB, 512 MB and 768 MB HP e3000

997 memory array boards. However, since there are a limited number of slots for plugging

memory into the 997 Server, some smaller memory array cards may need to be removed to

support large processor and large memory conﬁgurations.

Previous communications (e.g., the Spring 2000 HP e3000 Advisor) to 99x end-users have

noted that sales of some 99x memory products (the 256 MB, 512 MB and 768 MB memory

arrays) would be discontinued as of August 1, 2000. HP e3000 997 customers using

MPE/iX Release 6.0 Express 1 or 6.5 can continue to purchase the 8 GB memory carrier

board and associated 1 GB memory module (although Release 6.0 Express 1 and beyond

customers are limited to using only the ﬁrst 3.75 GB of any loaded memory).

So in summary, many HP e3000 applications will see added performance or greater

numbers of users using larger memory conﬁgurations (please check with your application

providers for details). However, greater than 3.75 GB memory conﬁgurations are limited