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OK here’s the quandry - I need to upgrade my ESX hosts built on 6 x Dell R610 PowerEdge servers. Dell are quoting £357.74 for 1 stick of 8Gb1333Mhz RDIMM ECC Dual Rank. However Kingston and Crucial are both quoting sub £170 per stick. So what are the likely differences going to be between the memory? The Crucial technical spec is as follows;

DDR3 PC3-10600 • CL=9 • Dual Ranked • Registered • ECC • DDR3-1333 • 1.5V • 1024Meg x 72

The only part I don’t understand with regards to performance is the component layout [1024x72] and I don’t have any spec from Dell yet.

Is my support for the Dell servers likely to be affected with 3rd party memory installed? Has anyone had 3rd party memory not work at all in a Dell PoweEdge Server? Is the considerable price increase for Dell memory considered money well spent.

Any advice or views would be most welcome.

5 Spice ups
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I can tell you from personal experience (Dell and HP), that if they find non-branded stuff in the box when troubleshooting, they have pointed to that as a problem. Mind you, it wasn’t, but I have seen that many times. If Crucial and Kingston certify it to work, it will probably just be fine. Just remember that tech support, not always, could be a pain in the butt.

4 Spice ups
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I’ve had the same experience as Denis. They may ask you to remove the 3rd party memory and reproduce the problem (which is not always feasable and will absolutely affect ability to fulfill service levels like a 4 hour parts delivery committment on some warranties)

If service levels are important to you, its best to have all vendor certified parts.

If they’re not as important and you can tolerate a little bit more downtime and troubleshooting in case of an outage, you can save money going third party.

1 Spice up
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I’ve seen people keep the old original memory and swap it back in when the tech is on their way. Pain, but have seen that.

2 Spice ups
5

just be careful with ram layout on servers eg…

http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/systems/peR710/en/HOM/HTML/install.htm#wp1223969

also I avoid Crucial for server grade stuff, never had a reject/failure with Kingston or Integral (yet!) but had quite a few rejects with Crucial stuff.

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If this is a new server like it looks, I would just go ahead and put in all Dell. That way you would be covered with warranty for the 3 years. Don’t think I would mix and match the memory anyway.

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I’ll chime in on needing to evaluate the cost savings vs. the pain in the butt factor of enterprise support for the box down the road. If you’re not buying a support contract (!) then this might not be an issue.

Perhaps it’s enough of an issue to re-evaluate who you’re buying your servers from?

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OK so I take onboard that support could be a problem although I’m not adverse to putting the OEM memory to one side and re-installing if required.

What about memory performance / quality are the DIMMS from Dell far superior than the DIMMS from Kingston / Crucial / Integral etc considering they all probably came from 1 of 3 manufacturing plants?

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I’ve never noticed a difference. To be honest, after warranties expire, I always use non-branded memory.

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Martin2012 wrote:

just be careful with ram layout on servers eg…

http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/systems/peR710/en/HOM/HTML/install.htm#wp1223969

also I avoid Crucial for server grade stuff, never had a reject/failure with Kingston or Integral (yet!) but had quite a few rejects with Crucial stuff.

Thanks for this - I spent many an hour pouring over the correct config variations I have available with our PE R610 / 5560 Quad processor / 3Channel per processor combos. I’ve come to the conclusion that to run a PE R610 with 2 x Intel Xeon 5560 processors I need to install 6 sticks of 8Gb Dual rank DDR3 1333Mhz. This is the only config of the available 12 memory slots I can use to enable the memory to run at 1333Mhz as anything more drops the memory speed down to 1066Mhz.

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Gary6380 wrote:

If this is a new server like it looks, I would just go ahead and put in all Dell. That way you would be covered with warranty for the 3 years. Don’t think I would mix and match the memory anyway.

No I wouldn’t mix and match the memory from any different vendors as I would see that as asking for trouble. In this case I will be ripping out 12 sticks of 2Gb DDR3 1333Mhz RDIMMS to amke way for the new stuff. Don’t get me started on why I was advised to only put 24Gb of memory in each of our ESX hosts as I was assured performance would just plateau if I put more in - NOT TRUE! If there is one lesson to take from my mistake memory really is key when specifying your ESX hosts - you can never have enough. Storage is secondary and CPU runs a close 3rd followed network bandwidth as an outsider - INMHO

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Yeah, mix and match is the devil.

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Daniel Eaton wrote:

I’ve had the same experience as Denis. They may ask you to remove the 3rd party memory and reproduce the problem (which is not always feasable and will absolutely affect ability to fulfill service levels like a 4 hour parts delivery committment on some warranties)

If service levels are important to you, its best to have all vendor certified parts.

If they’re not as important and you can tolerate a little bit more downtime and troubleshooting in case of an outage, you can save money going third party.

This is probably the crux of my considerations and I’m tending towards price over availability. We are after all talking about ESX servers and if one server does throw a problem then ‘maintenance mode’ and ‘VMotion’ to the rescue! However I do consider performance over price and am yet to be convinced the Dell memory will perform better than Kingston (I’ll shy away from Crucial for now)

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I’d stick with Kingston (not their value line) and pull and replace like you’re planning. For the price, I’d put in as much as I could afford, and then a little bit more!