PA-500 and memory upgrade

[BobW]

Recently I ordered and installed the memory upgrade for my PA-500.  It was under $400, is a simple end user install and upgraded the management plane to 2gb (from 1gb).

I will not give any estimates as to improvement as I do not want to exaggerate, however, I highly recommend anyone with a PA-500 spend the $400 (ish).

Hope that helps,

Bob

[BobW]

Unfortunately I did not do any pretesting.  Even if I did it would not have been valid as I took it to 5.0.3 at the same time.

It is my opinion that everything is quicker including the commit process.  Fro $400 (ish) I would suggest you give it a shot.  Best money I have spent in a while!

Bob

[scantwell]

Normally, from CLI, when you commit you see dots that show you the progress.

………………..55%.............75%.........90% etc

Here are the times.

	Student5	Student10
55%	1:17	:56
70%	1:31	1:06
98%	1:47	1:23
Complete	2:03	1:40

Based on these times, I would say that there is faster commit times, we saved closed to 25% of the commit time (~30 secs)

Student5 Swap:  2212876k total,   303200k used,  1909676k free,   129612k cached

Student10 Swap:  2008084k total, 0k used,  2008084k free,  1143148k cached

Then, from CLI mode, I loaded a script, which essentially loads a configuration and does the commit automatically.

Here are the times.

	Student5	Student19
55%	1:26	1.15
70%	1:41	1:28
98%	1:50	1:39
Complete	2:06	1:42

We are consistently seeing an increase of load capability and commit response times of 25%.

[panos]

%25 is very nice result.Thanks for test results.

[vchanal]

Hi,

Do you know if its possible to upgrade one member of a HA pair only?

Best Regard.

Vincent.

[scantwell]

I do not see any problems with upgrading a single FW only.  It should not break the HA functionality.