HP ProLiant DL980: Best Practices For Deployment

HP ProLiant DL980 server is not on Server Hardware Whitelist From Qlik Scalability Center. The main reason for HP ProLiant DL980 not being on the whitelist is that it is built on 8 socket CPU architecture, which leads to performance degrade. It is possible to mitigate performance issues through hardware and QlikView configuration as referred below. Note, the performance degrade can not be completely resolved on a 8 socket architecture. 

The Qlik Indexing (QIX) engine can only run optimized in 2- or 4-socket architecture. 8-socket architecture is technically two 4-socket not run in an optimized form on more than 4 socket architecture, see Performance Issues With 8 Socket Hardware for more details. 

HP has provided recommendation on how to configure the hardware for best Windows Server performance. The ROM-Based Setup Utility (RBSU) method for addressing memory is know to cause issues is Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Server 2012 and Windows Server 2012 R2. See HP's technical white paper with reference number emr_na-c02577023 for more details.

QlikView has specific hardware requirements for best possible performance, which can override some of the HP recommendations. For more details please see BIOS Settings For Best Performance On QlikView Server And QlikView Publisher. QlikView Server can not apply automatic NUMA detection in a 8 socket architecture like HP ProLiant DL980, so this must be enabled manually as described in QlikView Server Settings For NUMA Performance Improvement.

Due to a limitation associated with using Microsoft’s COM objects it is recommend that the number of QlikView Engines are limited to a maximum of 9 or the number of processor cores available on the host server -1, whichever is lower. For large number of CPUs, as on HP ProLiant DL980, it is often desired to use more than 9 QlikView engines. For these cases see How To Enable More Than 9 QlikView Engines for details on how to approach increasing the number of engines.