Chapter 1. Technical overview 15The possible configurations are: A one-node system is a one x3950 M2 server or one x3850 M2 server, withone, two, three, or four processors and up to 256 GB of RAM. A two-node complex is comprised of two x3950 M2 servers, with up to eightprocessors, and up to 512 GB RAM installed. A three-node complex is comprised of three x3950 M2 servers, up to 12processors, and up to 768 GB RAM installed. A four-node complex is comprised of four x3950 M2 servers, up to 16processors, and up to 1 TB RAM installed.PartitioningPartitioning is the concept of logically splitting a multinode complex into separatesystems. You can then install an operating system on a partition and have it runindependently from all other partitions. The advantage of partitioning is that youcan create and delete partitions without having to recable the complex. The onlyrequirement is that partitions be formed on node boundaries.The interface where you set up and maintain partitions is an extension of theRemote Supervisor Adapter II Web interface. It is used to create, delete, control,and view scalable partitions.Multinode complexes support partitioning on node boundaries. This means, forexample, you can logically partition your 2-node 8-way system as two 4-waysystems, while still leaving the complex cabled as 2 nodes. This increasesflexibility. You can reconfigure the complex by using the Web interface withoutchanging the systems or cabling.For more information about multinode complexes and partitioning, seeChapter 4, “Multinode hardware configurations” on page 195.1.4 x3950 M2 Windows Datacenter modelsIBM offers Windows 2003 Datacenter Edition as part of the following two IBMofferings, which are described in this section: IBM Datacenter Unlimited Virtualization IBM Datacenter Unlimited Virtualization with High AvailabilityNote: At the time of writing, only Windows 2003 Enterprise and Datacenter64-bit editions, RHEL 5 64-bit, and SLES 10 64-bit support this amount ofmemory. See 2.6, “Operating system scalability” on page 66 for details.
