Upgrading processors on 7000

[david parker_5]

Having got the 'bug' having bought an old 7000 with 4 x pentium pro processors, I'm now thinking I would like to speed up this beautiful beast with some pIII processors. Judging by the price of upgrade kits I would guess my best bet is to find a machine to cannibalise/mate with mine with the motherboard and processors I want. Wading through the huge number of pdf's available on each similar model has just left me exhausted! Can any Proliant vet possibly tell me which machines are similar enough to be able to cannibalise, rather than me waiting for a 7000 to come up with PIII's?

[Mike Bollman_1]

I have actually bought / perfmed the 7000 ->8000 conversion kits on 3 servers now. If you can still find a kit they are about 10K + processors on average. anyway....basically a ProLiant 8000 or a ML750 have the same chasis/parts as your 7000. Basically you will have to gut the entire box and swap over to all new parts. Which begs the question, why bother at that point. Either find an 8000 on ebay or buy the kit.

just my .02.

Mike B.

[david parker_5]

Ouch! I thought it was 'simply' a matter of changing motherboard and processors....
Many thanks.

[Mike Bollman_1]

I would venture to guess that you could get away with just the motherboard, system i/o board, processors, ppm modules. However, the kit itself arrives in a box about the size of a small freezer. The first thing it has you do is literally remove every cable, clamp, and board from the server. You are then left with just a bare empty shell. You then have to replace each board/cable and all the little things like plastic diveders and such. You might try calling chestnut micro and see if they have any of the kits left. If they do they may be willing to let them go cheap. Who knows.

good luck

mike B.

[David Townsend_2]

I'm doing the same thing - I've got a Proliant 7000 with PII 200 processors. The processors are incompatable with Windows 2003 server and it only sees one so I want to upgrade.
Can I just buy 2 or 4 PIII Xeon processors and 'plug them in'?

[Mike Bollman_1]

nope, the 200Mhz was a Pentium Pro, which is an entirely different socket than the PII or ever the PIII Xeons. You will have to buy the full kit to do the upgrade on this box.

[David Townsend_2]

Damn, thats not so good!

I've checked the bios and the start up - it doesn't actually say Pentium Pro - just PII.
You can by Xeon kits though - do you know the reference number?

Thanks for the reply.

[Mike Bollman_1]

If the bios report PII then you have either PII 400, 450, or 500Mhz with either 512KB, 1MB, or 2MB cache. You can upgrade within the same processor family. However, if you wish to go to PIII Xeon you will need the 7K->8K upgrade kit. To check which processors you have now I would visit the management agents homepage, https:\\servername:2381 This will tell you what you have now.

[Mike Bollman_1]

I dug around through my old email and found the 7000 to 8000 8way upgrade kit part#
401961-B21
this does NOT include processors, just all the parts necessary to make it accept the newer processors. also, This upgrade kit is quite involved.

[David Townsend_2]

Thanks for the info.

I've just priced the upgrade kit and its really expensive. I'll try and just upgrade to a PII 500 or something and hope for the best.

I doubt that it will solve the issue though of Windows 2003 not recognising both processors.

Do you think if I upgraded to 1 GIG of Ram it would speed it up significantly? 256 meg at the moment

[David Townsend_2]

...By the way, I've checked the HP Server Utility as you sugessted. It sees both processors as Pentium Pros 200 with 1 meg cache.

It sees both of them separate, and sees Windows 2003 server is installed. Unfortunatly (I think) Windows is only running on one of them.

[Mike Bollman_1]

David,
Did you use smart Start to install win2k3? If so, what method did you use? it almost sounds like the multiprocessor hal is not installed. I would upgrade the firmware on your server and check whether the uni-processor or multi-processor hal is loaded. The Pentium Pro 200 is compatabile with 2003 and should work, although it will be slow in all honesty.

[David Townsend_2]

Hi,
Yes I used smartstart. I booted up with the Smartstart CD, selected the operating system etc and followed the prompts.

If you read the article:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;319091
it explains some compatibility problems.

How can I check if the correct HAL has loaded? or even better, how can I check within Windows if both processors are being seen? If I START-RUN-WINMSD the processor speck only shows 1.

I realise it may be slow but the extra ram should make a difference. After all this, it may be that both are running but I'm not realising. I'm not sure how to check for definate within 2003 server.

I'll upgrade the firmware but I'm sure I've done this.

Many thanks for your help