Announcing the BuyVM hardware refresh to AMD Ryzen!

Francisco

This was just sent out to all active Slice customers!

===

New Year, New... Intel exploit? Sigh.

Since the launch of our KVM Slices, we have used Intel 1270v3 CPUs with SATA SSD storage. This setup has treated us well with performance that does not break the bank. Unfortunately, Intel CPUs have lost their performance advantage over the last 2 years due to design flaws that have led to security exploits/vulnerabilities.

You would have most likely heard of these exploits/vulnerabilities by the names 'Meltdown', 'Spectre', and 'MDS'.

While these exploits/vulnerabilities can be mitigated in software, this comes at the cost of performance. Estimates show a performance loss of around 30% when these mitigations are enabled (and even more if HT/SMT is disabled).

Today we are happy to announce a complete overhaul of all of our KVM Slice nodes to AMD Ryzen 3900X CPUs. Our originally advertised 3.5GHz clocks will increase to 3.8GHz with a boost clock of 4GHz+ (we are seeing an average boost clock of 4.1GHz on most cores). Storage will also be upgraded from SATA SSDs to NVME SSDs, which will increase IO performance by 4x or more.

Network connectivity will be upgraded from 1Gbit to 10Gbit. While your service will remain capped at 1Gbit in each direction, we are considering uncapping inbound speeds for long term customers (customers who have had an active service for >6 months for example). We haven't given this too much thought yet but many users have shown interest in veteran perks.

Last but not least, A+B power will be set up in Las Vegas to protect us from the Homer Simpsons that always seem to end up working on our power panels. This has been in the works for a while but has only recently become possible.

We have begun ordering equipment for Las Vegas and expect to be racking the new nodes in the next week or so. You will receive an email soon that will document when your VPS will be migrated. A reboot will be required upon which your Slice will automagically be migrated to our new nodes.

We expect to get New York done by early April and will be taking this opportunity to bring our Block Storage Slabs online with new network connectivity (ideally, NYIIX & Hurricane Electric). A new Juniper router will also be installed.

Luxembourg upgrades are for the moment up in the air, but we hope to complete them this year as well.

We thank you for your patronage and are excited to see what you think of our new nodes!

===

Francisco

FlamesRunner

I've been trying to cut back on how many boxes I have but god, @Francisco you make it impossible to let go of your slices

Can't wait for the Ryzen upgrade, I'm sure this will mean that slices will run even faster than they already do. Best of luck with the upgrade and hopefully everything goes according to plan!

Francisco

@FlamesRunner said:
I've been trying to cut back on how many boxes I have but god, @Francisco you make it impossible to let go of your slices

Can't wait for the Ryzen upgrade, I'm sure this will mean that slices will run even faster than they do. Best of luck with the upgrade and hopefully everything goes according to plan!

We have a test node up with it for the past month or so and its been great.

We've worked out whatever kinks we've had and can do big roll outs with ease these days.

Francisco

webmaster24

Another thumbs up as usual, what an amazing provider... and that is why I keep "voting" with my wallet.

IonSwitch_Stan

Francisco

@webmaster24 said:
Another thumbs up as usual, what an amazing provider... and that is why I keep "voting" with my wallet.

Thanks for the continued patronage

Some of the other changes will improve reliability since some users felt that was a sore spot. I agree, lets fix that.

Francisco

MohamadSY

Cheers ✌🏻

corbpie

🐐

thedp

BuyVM + Ryzen = Ultra Prem

Francisco

@thedp said:
BuyVM + Ryzen = Ultra Prem

• NVME + 10Gbit!

Francisco

tr0gd0r

What motherboard did you standardize on? If its good enough for Francisco, I may want it for my desktop at home.

Francisco

@tr0gd0r said:
What motherboard did you standardize on? If its good enough for Francisco, I may want it for my desktop at home.

We'll be using an ASROCK RACK X470D4U.

Francisco

donko

Dedicated servers on LU when?

ksug

ecc?

Francisco

@ksug said:
ecc?

Yes, ECC unbuffered.

Francisco

NobodyInteresting

Ryzen + 10Gbps + the most important (for me) part - NYIIX .... I shall be ordering quite a few once that day hits, sir!

Francisco

@t0ny0 said:
Ryzen + 10Gbps + the most important (for me) part - NYIIX .... I shall be ordering quite a few once that day hits, sir!

We'll add a decent bit more inventory with the NY roll out. As mentioned slabs will also go up at the same time. All one big shipment.

Francisco

NobodyInteresting

@Francisco said:

@t0ny0 said:
Ryzen + 10Gbps + the most important (for me) part - NYIIX .... I shall be ordering quite a few once that day hits, sir!

We'll add a decent bit more inventory with the NY roll out. As mentioned slabs will also go up at the same time. All one big shipment.

Francisco

I mean... If you have something up now - I'd be cool to have my VM migrated earlier lol
Now I'm just pushing my luck haaha

Francisco

@t0ny0 said:

@Francisco said:

@t0ny0 said:
Ryzen + 10Gbps + the most important (for me) part - NYIIX .... I shall be ordering quite a few once that day hits, sir!

We'll add a decent bit more inventory with the NY roll out. As mentioned slabs will also go up at the same time. All one big shipment.

Francisco

I mean... If you have something up now - I'd be cool to have my VM migrated earlier lol
Now I'm just pushing my luck haaha

Not for NY.

Working on it though

Francisco

DA_Mark

@Francisco said:
Last but not least, A+B power will be set up in Las Vegas to protect us from the Homer Simpsons that always seem to end up working on our power panels.

cazrz

Great! Bring it on! Got 19 services. All seems good, only 3 in actual use. Rest are idle and for testing.

This is a good example of great provider. You fall, you learn, you stand, regain your rep and be steady on the right direction. Unlike others who doesn't have b*lls.

Zigi

Absolutely frantastic. I've been using a LV Ryzen server for while now while testing it has been rock solid

sin

Nice! Just picked up a new LV slice with some more slabs the other day too.

poisson

@tr0gd0r said:
What motherboard did you standardize on? If its good enough for Francisco, I may want it for my desktop at home.

You want to set up a few racks at home?

tr0gd0r

@poisson said:
You want to set up a few racks at home?

That motherboard is a standard mobo that can be installed in any case. I believe its Micro ATX.

MikeA

@tr0gd0r said:

@poisson said:
You want to set up a few racks at home?

That motherboard is a standard mobo that can be installed in any case. I believe its Micro ATX.

For home use you should probably just stick with a typical consumer board. Not to mention the newer X570 boards are better to use for the newer chips, and some have better VRMs, and some are cheaper.

jmginer

@Francisco said:

We'll be using an ASROCK RACK X470D4U.

Francisco

I hope you have better luck with that motherboard than I did.

I had these problems in September 2019 and now I just checked that in November they released a new BIOS v3.30, maybe they have corrected these problems... I wish you luck!

I copy here the message I sent to AsRock support:

--

Hello, the server is blocked with a message: Update FRU System device

I'm unable to enter the BIOS and also don't boot nothing.

I have been able to access the BIOS by removing the battery from the motherboard.

Then I disabled the "Inventory support" option in the BIOS and the problem was not reproduced.

I was able to install the operating system, but when I restarted and wanted to enter the BIOS again I had more problems.

The BIOS screen was completely blue, locked... On the motherboard the status was A9 and when I connected the keyboard changed to B4, but it didn't show any content... I've started the computer several times without any positive results.

I removed the battery from the BIOS again and I was able to access it again.

Another problem that I have detected, is that when I turn on the computer, it does not work...the lights come on, the fans turn, but there's no POST on the screen. I have to hit the reset button and then starts correctly.

There are also problems in the IPMI connection through Java, the ISO image is disconnected randomly, the screen shows a window of "Reconnection" that at the end works, but it is necessary to re-mount the ISO and the system has already shown errors, so we had to start again with the HTML5 version that has worked well.

Additionally, I found that the SATA cables were connected on ports 7 and 8, which causes nomenclature problems in Linux, since it detects it as sdi instead of sda.

In general, I'm disappointed with the server... the procedure to put in production is not expected and has not passed the minimum quality test, so unfortunately we will not buy more units.

--

This was his response:

Hi Jose,

Sorry to hear this.

This is my Cmos reset procedure :

• Disconnect your power cable
• Remove the Cmos Battery
• Press the power button to drain residual energy
• Touch/Short the 2 points/pads on the Clr_cmos pad ( yellow circle)with a paperclip

I shall check with my colleague about the other issues you encounter how we can best solve them..

Regards,

--

And I didn't get any further response...

Francisco

We've been fine on ours I updated the BIOS early into things to the latest. The IPMI got updated early on as well.

I've not had any issues since. We'll see how more boards/servers go.

Francisco

poisson

With new stuff BIOS support can be tricky. This is why I prefer not to go for the absolutely latest generation but I am content with being one generation behind so that all the BIOS gremlins are sorted out.

Francisco

@poisson said:
With new stuff BIOS support can be tricky. This is why I prefer not to go for the absolutely latest generation but I am content with being one generation behind so that all the BIOS gremlins are sorted out.

The board has been around for 2xxx.

Francisco

poisson

@MikeA said:
For home use you should probably just stick with a typical consumer board. Not to mention the newer X570 boards are better to use for the newer chips, and some have better VRMs, and some are cheaper.

Yes. I'm cheap, so I went for a B450 (which still allows me to upgrade to the current generation with a BIOS update).

poisson

@Francisco said:

@poisson said:
With new stuff BIOS support can be tricky. This is why I prefer not to go for the absolutely latest generation but I am content with being one generation behind so that all the BIOS gremlins are sorted out.

The board has been around for 2xxx.

Francisco

I know. It works well for the 2xxx series for sure. The 3xxx series had some initial issues on this board with the early batch of BIOS if I recall correctly, but now it shouldn't be the case and it's a great board to power your fleet!

MikeA

I've never had issues with it. OVH uses it as well.

Jord

Wow can BuyVM get any better 😍 Ryzen is very prem.

Francisco

@MikeA said:
I've never had issues with it. OVH uses it as well.

I'm a huge fan of the IPMI since it has NFS support.

No more shitty SMB!

Francisco

Serverman

Ryzen in servers is the future. I have been giving money to providers for years. Ended up buying myself a 3600x based system for testing, and i ordered 3950x a few days ago. Cant want for that to arrive.

Looking at what i have paid for servers over the years, my system with my new upgrades, will "pay for itself" within 6 months. Not bad at all.

hiphiphip0

So if I buy now, it would on new gear?

sonic

@hiphiphip0 said:
So if I buy now, it would on new gear?

No.

nhocconan

hiphiphip0 said: So if I buy now, it would on new gear?

No available stock atm. I keep watching them ...

default

Goodbye Intel.

Francisco

@hiphiphip0 said:
So if I buy now, it would on new gear?

In the next week or two for Vegas.

Francisco

elliotc

Where is the stock notification website btw?

thedp

@elliotc said:
Where is the stock notification website btw?

https://buyvmstock.com/

Francisco

@elliotc said:
Where is the stock notification website btw?

There is always stock on the 1st and 7th

Francisco

Nihim

That's awesome but allow me to be the first to "whine" - hope this doesn't push back the LU slabs a lot

eva2000

Francisco said: Today we are happy to announce a complete overhaul of all of our KVM Slice nodes to AMD Ryzen 3900X CPUs. Our originally advertised 3.5GHz clocks will increase to 3.8GHz with a boost clock of 4GHz+ (we are seeing an average boost clock of 4.1GHz on most cores). Storage will also be upgraded from SATA SSDs to NVME SSDs, which will increase IO performance by 4x or more.

Network connectivity will be upgraded from 1Gbit to 10Gbit. While your service will remain capped at 1Gbit in each direction, we are considering uncapping inbound speeds for long term customers (customers who have had an active service for >6 months for example). We haven't given this too much thought yet but many users have shown interest in veteran perks.

congrats Fran ! The Ryzen 3900X is a beast of a cpu especially if you're using 5.3+ linux kernels with them

momkin

That's awesome news ,
but don't get me wrong you need to fix the uptime of your servers due to a lot of downtime more often which makes the service unusable .

Also since you changed the CPUS i think you should increase the CPU cores of your slices for a better performance !

And finally do you have any plans to introduce dedicated servers ? i will more interested in those

Francisco

@momkin said:
That's awesome news ,
but don't get me wrong you need to fix the uptime of your servers due to a lot of downtime more often which makes the service unusable .

Also since you changed the CPUS i think you should increase the CPU cores of your slices for a better performance !

And finally do you have any plans to introduce dedicated servers ? i will more interested in those

If you have logs or anything like that of when things are unusable I'm all ears.

Not planning any core changes, it would just burn up whatever extra cycles we get out of this.

Not planning any dedicated servers, I dont like the margins.

Francisco

TimboJones

@jmginer said:

@Francisco said:

We'll be using an ASROCK RACK X470D4U.

Francisco

I hope you have better luck with that motherboard than I did.

I had these problems in September 2019 and now I just checked that in November they released a new BIOS v3.30, maybe they have corrected these problems... I wish you luck!

I copy here the message I sent to AsRock support:

--

Hello, the server is blocked with a message: Update FRU System device

I'm unable to enter the BIOS and also don't boot nothing.

I have been able to access the BIOS by removing the battery from the motherboard.

Then I disabled the "Inventory support" option in the BIOS and the problem was not reproduced.

I was able to install the operating system, but when I restarted and wanted to enter the BIOS again I had more problems.

The BIOS screen was completely blue, locked... On the motherboard the status was A9 and when I connected the keyboard changed to B4, but it didn't show any content... I've started the computer several times without any positive results.

I removed the battery from the BIOS again and I was able to access it again.

Another problem that I have detected, is that when I turn on the computer, it does not work...the lights come on, the fans turn, but there's no POST on the screen. I have to hit the reset button and then starts correctly.

There are also problems in the IPMI connection through Java, the ISO image is disconnected randomly, the screen shows a window of "Reconnection" that at the end works, but it is necessary to re-mount the ISO and the system has already shown errors, so we had to start again with the HTML5 version that has worked well.

Additionally, I found that the SATA cables were connected on ports 7 and 8, which causes nomenclature problems in Linux, since it detects it as sdi instead of sda.

In general, I'm disappointed with the server... the procedure to put in production is not expected and has not passed the minimum quality test, so unfortunately we will not buy more units.

--

This was his response:

Hi Jose,

Sorry to hear this.

This is my Cmos reset procedure :

• Disconnect your power cable
• Remove the Cmos Battery
• Press the power button to drain residual energy
• Touch/Short the 2 points/pads on the Clr_cmos pad ( yellow circle)with a paperclip

I shall check with my colleague about the other issues you encounter how we can best solve them..

Regards,

--

And I didn't get any further response...

I've had pretty good motherboard luck over the years, except for an ASRACK motherboard I wanted to use with ESXi. It had an LSI raid and 10GB NIC. The raid and Ethernet would fail after a day or two and need reboots. It was unstable and couldn't work with modern video cards, like RX580. Seemed like physical defects in the board.

The support was pretty good. You can talk directly with a real engineer who has access to schematics. Anyway, I shipped the mobo in, he tested with a power hungry nvidia and said no issues. He swapped the mobo anyways but I still couldn't get it working stable. His conclusion was a hairline crack in a CPU trace between x16 slot and CPU since its a direct route.

In contrast, the level of interest and detailed replies I have never seen from companies with consumer offerings like that. So I've been hesitant to buy another ASRack product, but was very pleased with speaking at a real technical level and not regurgitating shit from a basic manual that just screenshots the bios.

I bought three 2920X Threadrippers on Amazon Prime day, two for work and one at home, so I won't be buying any more mobo's for myself anytime soon.

vpsre

good!

angstrom

@vpsre said:
good!

Congrats on your second comment