RAM, who doesn’t want more of it.

Each of the nodes in my VM cluster has 16GB of RAM. That give me 48GB across the cluster. Not bad, but why not go for more.

My nodes are DELL Optiplex 7050 Micros, each supporting up to 32GB of DDR4 at 2400 MT/s. That’s a fair amount of ram to buy (that times 3). But what if I didn’t have to get three RAM kits. My old FrameWork laptop uses DDR4, and both use SODIMM sticks.

The only issue, is that my FrameWork has 3200 MT/s RAM. Faster than the DELLs support… Or is it. After popping the 3200 sticks in, it booted just fine. So, I ordered two kits of 3200 RAM.

RAM By Mail

With the RAM in hand, is was time to get to work. Shutting down one of the nodes (and waiting for the VMs to auto migrate), I pulled it off the shelf.

These DELLs are super easy to get into. Just one thumb screw to pop the case open.

And a pinch of the tabs to remove the fan.

With the old RAM out, and the new RAM in, this node was done. Just repeat all this for the other node, and we’re done. And ProxMox reports way more RAM available to the cluster.

The cool part about this. None of my VMs accumulated any down time. As they just migrated to another node when I asked one to shutdown. That’s still magic to me.