Moving from 4 processors to 2

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Guest

Dear All,
We are running People Soft Enterprise One, we did have 2 boxes set up as
a cluster, but we ended having to break the cluster...which is fine. We use
the other box (18) for maintenence and upgrade items associated with People
Soft ONLY. This box has 4 Xeon processors (700) and 4g of ram. I don't want
to rebuild the box at all...we are trying to beef up another box and want to
remove 2 processors from this one and give it to the other. When I tried
this...it bluescreened before really loading...it is a dell 6450 with SCSI
hd. Does anyone know if MS Server 2000 needs to have a special setting to
allow it to run on 2 when it has been running on 4...this is the issue, all I
seem to find is info relating to moving up the number of processors. Any
help would be greatly appreciated....
Thanks,
k
 
KGEXodus said:
Dear All,
We are running People Soft Enterprise One, we did have 2 boxes set up as
a cluster, but we ended having to break the cluster...which is fine. We use
the other box (18) for maintenence and upgrade items associated with People
Soft ONLY. This box has 4 Xeon processors (700) and 4g of ram. I don't want
to rebuild the box at all...we are trying to beef up another box and want to
remove 2 processors from this one and give it to the other. When I tried
this...it bluescreened before really loading...it is a dell 6450 with SCSI
hd. Does anyone know if MS Server 2000 needs to have a special setting to
allow it to run on 2 when it has been running on 4...this is the issue, all I
seem to find is info relating to moving up the number of processors. Any
help would be greatly appreciated....
Thanks,
k
Click to expand...


/Which/ two processors did you remove ?

The sockets (slots ?) should be numbered CPU0,CPU1,CPU2,CPU3.
Unless that motherboard/BIOS has very advanced fault tolerance
features, in a 2 CPU mode you will probably have to have CPU0 and
CPU1. That level of fault tolerance is not something one would
ever expect to find in a Dell, so you need to make sure you
removed CPU2 and CPU3 and left CPU0 and CPU1 alone.

The fact that you are even getting to the point where you get a
blue screen pretty much proves that at least CPU0 is still in
place. Your system would not even post with CPU0 missing.

As well, some older boxes had BIOS settings that you had to
adjust according to the number of processors installed.

Also check to make sure that you didn't unseat any heatsinks or
knock any CPU fan cables loose while you were taking the other
two CPUs out.



Can you boot into safe mode ? If yes, your problem is /probably/
software rather than hardware or the OS.

You should also check your boot.ini for a switch about the number
of processors. IIRC, it is /numproc=n. If it is there and has
a value greater than 2, remove it or change it to 2.
 
We do not have it listed...that would be in the boot.ini....I always thought
that you could go up in processors, but not down...is that true?
Thanks,
k
 
KGEXodus said:
We do not have it listed...that would be in the boot.ini....I always thought
that you could go up in processors, but not down...is that true?
Thanks,
k
Click to expand...

I have gone up and down a few times while evaluating 2P and 4P
Opteron boxes for a few people.

Typically a 4P box arrives with 4 processors installed and I run
performance tests. I then pull two processors and repeat the
tests. At that point the client has the data he needs in order
to decide whether to buy the box with 2 processors with an option
to add more in the future, or just buy it with 4 processors
pre-installed. Or just buy a 2P system.

I have yet to run into any snags when removing 2 of the 4
processors in order to see how a particular 4P box works with
only two processors. And no snags after restoring the box to its
original 4 processor configuration either.

I tend to test with both W2K and W2K3-64.

Less frequently I have also done similar testing with 2P boxes:
test with both processors and then re-test with just one.
 
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