Using Montecito on Montvale chipset

[PW HP-UX Support Team]

We're in the process of building a new rx7640 server with HP-UX 11.31. The new server does not have access to our Ignite environment, so we plan on igniting the drives for the server beforehand and inserting them into the server later.

I know this works and how to do it, as we have done it many times in the past. However up until now all our server hardware configurations have been the same.

This time, the destination server is identical in every way, except that the chipset is now Montvale instead of Montecito.

Anyone have any experience bringing up a Montecito on a Montvale chipset? Upgrade your CPUs in place on an existing server perhaps?

[Duncan Edmonstone]

Honestly the differences between Intel 9000 (Montecito) and 9100 (Montvale) CPUs are fairly minor, so assuming you _really_ have everything else the same (e.g. sx2000 chipset and similar set of IO cards), I don't think you will have any problems. I would want to make sure I had a pretty up-to-date patch set installed on my source server before starting (I did a search of the patch database with the string "intel 9100" and there were a few hits - none looked critical, but I doubt the dynamic p-state capabilities of Montvale will work without these patches)

HTH

Duncan

[PW HP-UX Support Team]

Thanks Duncan. I'll keep the thread open and update it once I find out the hard way. Worst case is I have to ship the entire server to me and re-ignite it and ship it back out again. Still faster than installing from scratch and then re-configure for days on end with all our software packages.

[PW HP-UX Support Team]

So far so good. Server booted fine several times, no issues. We'll need to put it through it's paces before we're 100% convinced, but I'm confident.

Cheers.

[PW HP-UX Support Team]

Closing.

[Torsten.]

Just my 2 cents: chipset does not mean CPU type.

You typically have the sx2, sx1000, sx2000 or sx3000 chipset - equipped with either PA-RISC or Itanium CPUs (e.g. Intel series 9000, 9100, 9300, ...), as long as you meet the requirements (server model xy needs OS release 11.31 march 2010 in order to use CPU model xy or even DIMM model xy for example) you are good to go.