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After a year of service the 3 685 c class blades that I work with have served us well.  They started as Dual Proc AMD 8216 (dual core 2.4ghz) with 16gb of ram.  In order to expand the virtualization in our environment we decided to double the resources in each of the blades by adding 2 more procs and 16gb of ram.  I added the ram last week, but because of limitations in the system bus you need to have all 4 procs installed before the other 8 dimm banks are activiated.

Steps involved to upgrade procs & memory:

1. Add new licenses from vmware (esx is licensed by every 2 physical procs/sockets)
2. Login to Virtual Center and put host in maintenance mode.
3. This should vmotion all virtual machines from that host to other running hosts.
4. Shutdown host
5. Carefully install cpus and ram
6. Start server (will reboot once after starting)
7. Upgrade complete with ZERO downtime in the middle of the day.
8. 685c blades are now 4 cpu, 8 core and 32gb ram and ready for some more action.