Upgrading the RAM in an ESM appliance

[mark.riddick]

I have a customer that has had an ETM-5600 for at least four years when I first started looking after it. Version 9.5.x back then, IIRC.

Present-day and the same ESM is running 11.2.1 where the customer has noticed a progressive downturn in performance, especially when loading dashboards and applying filters. Another problem with 11.x.x has been intermittent Query Management Service issues.

The latest SR with Support has led to the most recent patch being applied to the ESM, and there seems to be a slight increase in performance. This SR also asked the question of upgrading the ESM's RAM as another means of increasing performance. Despite the motherboard being able to support up to 768GB RAM, Support has said that any upgrades from the factory-installed 64GB RAM will void the appliance's warranty. Given that there are customer replaceable items within the appliance such as RAID controllers, disk drives etc., I fail to see why changing or adding memory, using identical modules in the latter case, would make any difference. The SR has been escalated for confirmation...

My question is this. Has anyone upgraded an ESM appliance from the factory spec using motherboard compatible memory modules? If so, any problems?

TIA

Mark

[brenta]

Not sure what generation you have, but they were originally Dell machines, as of recent they are just rebranded Supermicro's. I'm pretty sure it will boot with more memory, you could do some poking around to be sure. The stock 64GB might be UNBUFFERED ECC, going to 768GB will require buffered ECC, which will slow memory access rates.

Support would be lost for sure if they ever found out. Would they? Meh, probably not. I'm really not sure adding more memory will help your issue. It may be able to add a small amount of buffered space for disk caching, but it is unlikely you are going to be able to get into cache everything the database is going to want to display with large dashboards and such.

Maybe look at converting to VM licenses since these limitations basically go away, and you can back it with faster disks (which will give you large performance boosts).

[mark.riddick]

Hi Brent

Thanks for your reply.

The appliance is a Gen 4 ETN 5600. Support tells me that adding extra RAM would be recognised and used by the underlying Linux OS but that the application itself would likely become unstable and crash. Seems memory limits are imposed so as to optimise the application's performance. 

Bottom line, though, is that if memory is added/changed then the warranty is void and support will no longer be provided. That is too much of a risk from the cusomer's point of view.

Mark

[David1111]

Hi

you could just take backups of data and configurations etc.

make a Factory Reset and install (with a Disk connected to USB to the appliance) the 10.3.4 version

that's the best version, and regarding RAM

that version need a lot less RAM than the 11.2 version

Best Regards👍👍👍

David.

[erelleke]

Mark,

They are right additionally upgrades could fail. You would be in an unsupported state. The QMS issues have been addressed in the latest releases and many customers have seen resolution with 11.3.