Posted By Jon on Sep 18, 2015 | 2 comments

If you read my blog regularly then you may recall that a few weeks ago I ordered and installed 72GB of PC3-10600R ECC RAM in my Dell R710.  I may have mentioned that this server is going to another location to be an extension of my homelab and to support other tasks.  I probably also mentioned that my next upgrade would be some 6-core Xeon 56xx series CPUs in order to get 24 vCPU and 72GB in the same R710.  That was the plan until I had come across some awesome memory – 18 DIMMs of 8GB PC3-10600R ECC!

My goal is to take a couple servers and consolidate into one server with the same or greater capacity.  I want to have one large server that can support all my VMs as well as additional for test environments.  This RAM should provide just that and I didn’t hesitate to throw it in:

Pictured above is a tray holding (6) 2GB DIMMs that originally shipped with my R710 along with the new 8GB DIMMs.  The server is already populated with (18) 4GB DIMMs in the image.

The 72GB kit I had picked up was actually from HP but that doesn’t matter.  Both the 4GB and 8GB DIMMs I have are made by Hynix and are identical but for the size of each DIMM.  All of the “old” 4GB DIMMs are out:

And the new 8GB DIMMs are in totaling 144GB of RAM installed in the R710.  This will prove to be excellent for VM capacity:

So, now I just need to sell off this 72GB kit I have since I won’t need it any longer.  It’s tempting to find another R710 to put it in but I am trying to consolidate into one server at this location so as to not have multiple servers eating up electricity.  This should do the trick!