I have had this ongoing saga of not being able to find the correct heat sink for CPU#2 for my BL460c gen 8 blade server for a while. The original reseller used an integrator that came in at a lower price than I could build it myself for so I let them build it. I immediately had to make corrections to for NIC’s and memory. There was also some negotiation between the reseller and integrator who tried to up the price though the specs I provided them were clear and I was sticking to that price or would build it myself. We tried several heatsinks and none of them fit except the last they sent but it fit with the heat sink fins sideways which blocked the air flow but let the heat sink actually contact the CPU due to the t-shaped design of the bottom of the heat sink.
I’m usually pretty good a retrofitting and redesign but the little changes I did to make things fit didn’t work as well as I hoped and every time I upped the load on a VM that sat on the BL460c the whole chassis would rev up like jet engines taking off until I reduced the CPU load or moved the VM that had continually high CPU resource usage to my backup Dell r710 servers which didn’t have the same issues. I finally looked at a different set of part numbers for this heat sink and found it was for the Gen9 servers!
I tried a few resellers on Ebay and though they said their heatsinks were for CPU2 on the bl460c gen 8 blade servers they ended up being for the heat sink for the second CPU on a rack mount HPE gen8 which are physically too large by about1/8th an inch one each side. Now I recall the integrator passing a message that they would need to depopulate memory for the second heat sink. Turns out they were having the same issues I had locating the proper heat sink part numbers and didn’t realize their error.
Quickspecs manuals for the BL460c gen 8 blade server wasn’t as much help as normal for this part number as the heat sinks were not listed. Finally I went to Amazon found a vendor with the proper part number and description sent for it and it took forever to get here but it worked! I ordered another heat sink for my other bl460c gen8 blade server and it came within 2 days this time which happened to be today so I installed it around 150 minutes ago, then I started putting a load which would increase CPU resource usage that normally would have the entire chassis screaming at such a high decibel level of a jet plane and the chassis is not screaming for mercy with all of the fans on high! What a relief.
The time to go through the parts system they have for these systems if not listed in the systems Quicspecs which are definitive part manuals made this a nightmare for everyone as there are 4 or five part numbers that seem like they are correct, then with slow shipping with Covid-19 to get the parts and returning them it was a time wasting draining process. The correct part number ended up being 670032-001. The correct description was important too, I had this combination of correct part number and description with another vendor and still got the wrong part. Very important to get this right so the heat sink fins are oriented for proper air flow in this tight enclosure, the heat sink is properly connected and transferring heat for dissipation to the heat sink and height is correct as there is a small controller board that fits over the top of this heat sink in position number 2.
Every piece of hardware, firmware, application and OS usage matters in these tightly integrated systems and you have to keep searching grinding and matching to get a cohesive and redundant properly working solution.
Below are some earlier pictures that illustrate how the heat sinks air flow should go and the bottom picture shows the t-shaped bottom of the heat sink. Note these are also the wrong heat sinks. I was too excited to get this in to take pictures of the correct heat sinks being put in place.
