Best Practices When Deploying VMware vSphere on the HP ProLiant DL980 (updated October 2012)

Enabling memory mirroring after installation

If you enabled memory mirroring after installing ESX, follow these steps:

1. Connect to the newly-installed ESX Server using vSphere Client.

2. Go to Configuration Panel > Software Advanced Settings > VMkernel.

3. Uncheck the VMkernel.Boot.useNUMAInfo setting to disable Non-Uniform Memory Access (NUMA).

4. Reboot the server.

5. Enable Memory Mirroring again using the BIOS, as described above.

Note

After applying the above configuration change, you will not be able to verify the

useNUMAInfo parameter on the grub boot line. The information is stored in the

/etc/vmware/esx.conf configuration file and embedded in an updated

initrd.img file.

Configuring vSphere 5.0 or 5.1

This section describes how to configure vSphere 5.0 optimally on the HP ProLiant DL980 server.

Enabling 2 GB memory mapped I/O

The DL980 server BIOS provides a configuration setting that lets the system provide either 2 or 3 GB of Memory Mapped

I/O (MMIO). However, HP has observed that the boot sequence may not complete if MMIO is set to 3 GB, since this can

leave insufficient memory to load drivers for the operating environment. In this scenario, the boot process may

unexpectedly exit to the shell when it attempts to load certain device drivers.

To change the MMIO setting, follow these steps:

1. Reboot the server and press F9 when prompted during POST.

2. Navigate through the BIOS menu to Advanced Options > Advanced System ROM Options > Memory Mapped I/O

Options.

3. Select 2GB of Memory Mapped I/O (see Figure 6).