We have some 8GB Dimms on hand that we intent to start testing soon. The PE1955 blade center is actually a recent acquisition for us. We are still in the capacity planning stage and building it up.
Prior to purchasing the PE1955 blade center we used a mix of Dell 1U and 2U standalone servers. We do a lot with Microsoft Hyper-V virtualization and leverage failover clustering, cluster shared volumes and Hyper-V’s Live Migration. Our data and product implementations reside inside the virtual machines. Physical server to us are just virtual hosts that we see as pools or RAM and CPU. As such, we started phasing out some of our older PE 860's in order to accomplish greater resource density per U of server/rack space. To achieve this we initially built up a few PE 1950's and PE 2950's. Later when Microsoft introduce dynamic memory, it opened up an avenue to increase our VM density per host. We seized the opportunity to take it a step further and reduced off peak hour running costs. By over building one of our Host with extra RAM (and maximum redundancy) we were able to live migrate all the VMs onto it during off peak hours and shed the unneeded nodes. That hardiest server was a PowerEdge 1950 G III with dual Quad core E5345’s and 64GB of ram (8)x 8GB Dimms.
Currently our PE1955 blade center has (10)x PE 1955 blades.
Each Blade is populated with (8)x 2GB for 16GB total per blade.
Between what's in the PE1955's now and what we can commandeer from the existing PE 1950's / PE 2950's we have the below RAM inventory on hand:
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Dimm Size | # of Dimms in Inventory
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1 GB | 0
2 GB | 80
4 GB | 8
8 GB | 10
Our hopes were to upgrade (5)x blades to 32GB using the below configuration.
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Blade
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Slot# Dimm Size:
1 8 GB
2 4 GB
3 2 GB
4 2 GB
5 8 GB
6 4 GB
7 2 GB
8 2 GB
And then keep the other (5)x blades as currently configure with 16GB of (8)x 2GB
Not sure how plausible it is; however it be optimal as under that scenario we'd only need to by (2)x additional 4GB Dimms.