I have a customer who wants to reduce the number of active processors in several of their servers.
The server I’m testing on is an HP ProLiant BL680c G5 with 16GB memory, 4 quad core processors running Windows Server 2003 R2 Enterprise Edition.
The only way I’ve found so far is to use the /NUMPROC= switch in the boot.ini.
Adding /NUMPROC=12 and rebooting is fine, task mamager shows 12 processors.
Adding /NUMPROC=8 is fine, it shows 8 processors.
But adding /NUMPROC=4 causes problems. The server is functional, and again, shows it as running on only 4 processors, but we use HP Network Configuration Utility to team a couple of the NICs. This fails, saying that a required xml file is corrupt and cannot be read. So the teaming software bombs out, breaks the team, and the NIC ends up having the status of disconnected.
Changing the processors back up to 8 resolves the teaming problem, and all’s OK again!
The question is: Is there any other way to limit the number of functioning processors, other than the boot.ini? I’ve looked in the BIOS and the only option I have is to use all the cores in all the processors, or to use half the cores in all the processors, which is not what the customer wants.
Alternatively, is there fix for the failing teaming software?
Thanks for looking, hope you can help.
