Lost some memory on a DL380 G3

[V. Jansen]

Hello,

I've the following problem:
Today I installed two identical DL380 G3servers with Windows 2003 Server Enterprise.

The servers contains 6144MB memory. The selftest and bios displays 6144MB. Windows 2003 Server Enterprise displays only 3584MB memory on both servers. Insight management displays 3349000KB of memory.

Need some help.

Thanx,
Roger

[Doug de Werd]

My guess is that the memory is configured as "Online Spare Memory" in the system BIOS. You have 3 banks of memory (actually each bank is a pair od DIMMs due to interleaved memory). With online Spare memory, the thrid bank is set up to be an spare bank to the first two. So the BIOS shows it as being there, but the OS doesn't. The OS will see 2/3 of the memory when it's configured this way.

So you could change the memory setting in the BIOS to be able to use it all.

According to your math, that would still leave about 512 MB unaccounted for, but that's probably some kind of memory shadowing being used for BIOS (just a guess).

So if you need all 6 GB, just change the setting in BIOS.

Thanks,
Doug

[Vijay_44 · Accepted solution]

Few things that you can check on:

Check to see if online spare is configured.

To enable windows to see over 4GB the /PAE switch has to be used in the boot.ini.

Hot plug PCI will also utilize some of the RAM. If not required disable it from the RBSU (F9)

[V. Jansen]

Hello Doug,

I took a view at the Rbsu but can't find the option. I do the following:
Start server, Press F9, System Option, Advanced Memory Protection. The only options i've seen are, Advanced ECC support and Online spare with ECC support.

This options does't resolve my problem. Need a little bit more help. I think the answer is almost there.

Roger

[kcpant]

hi,

if you have already set /PAE switch in your boot.ini ( which enables 32 bit windows O/S to "see" more than 4 GB memory), you please disable online spare memory support in APM option of RBSU.

regards,

[kcpant]

i'm sorry written APM instead of AMP ( advanced memory protection)


regards,

[V. Jansen]

Could the following maybe the possible problem?

The processor of my DL380 G3 is 32bits.
2^32= 4294967296bits = 4096Mbits. So that this is the limit of the memory. I discover that it's not possible to create a pagefile larger 4096Mb on my new DL380G3.

Is there a manner to use the full 6144Mb memory?

Roger

[SAKET_5]

Hi Roger,

the logic used in your last thread would be right and thats why you need to add /PAE for Physical Address Extension which allows 32 bit Windows to use more than 4GB ram.

As suggested in the previous replies, please modify the boot.ini appending the /PAE switch in the end and reboot.

This should solve your problem

Yes, the max sixe of pagefile on Windows is 4096 but then you could setup multiple pagefile.sys on different volumes/partition if you needed a larger pagefile.

Hope it was of help and could you please assign points to the replies.

Regards,

[V. Jansen]

Saket,

It works!!! Let's rock & roll

Grtz,
Roger

End of this topic