(Trying to) Upgrade memory in ESXi server
My ESXi server has been faithfully serving me for the past five years. As noted previously, it has just 8GB of ram installed (4x2GB). No, you did not misread that; eight gigabytes. This has been fine for my needs as the virtual machines running are not ram-hungry. The 2003 server, vortexbox, Openmediavault and an XubuntuLTS release comfortably run in less then 6GB. Now, however, I have begun to test out Windows 10 and it would be nice to have more memory to devote to the machine(s).
I could have just built a new machine, with a bunch more RAM, but that would have been unnecessary at this time. The server is rarely ever taxed CPU-wise; most of the times it is using much less than 1Ghz in total. Harddrive performance is not an issue as there are five physical drives, and each vm is directed to its own drive. And as there is 10TB of capacity in there… well, available space certainly is not an immediate concern. So there was no compelling reason to upgrade anything other than memory.
I don’t know if you’ve noticed but DDR2 is no longer in demand, it being eclipsed years back by DDR3 (and now that is being overrun by DDR4). The major suppliers have inflated DDR2 to silly levels. So I turned to ebay to see what could be found. A Chinese supplier was selling new Samsung chips for a reasonable price. I ended up paying $51 for 16GB (4x4GB), the maximum my motherboard could support. It arrived in about ten days.
RAM
This should have ended with me having 16GB of ram, and enjoying multiple Win 10 test machines. But that was not to be. Everything went south from here. You can read the details of that story here.
I will be sticking with the existing 8GB until I eventually do a machine upgrade down the road.
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