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Most Cost Effective CPU for Virtualizatin
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Most Cost Effective CPU for Virtualizatin

randvegetarandvegeta Member, Host Rep

Which CPU is the best value for money with respect to virtualization.

Or in other words, which gets you the most bang for your buck, factoring in things like power consumption, RAM capacity (but not physical space).

I'm looking to build a new cluster of hypervisors. The Scalable line from Intel doesn't look all that interesting if I'm honest, but the AMD line is starting to look pretty good (though I've avoided them for the past decade or so). I've been settling on various generations of the Xeon E5 line but i think it may be time to move on from these work horses.

Opinions?

Comments

  • oplinkoplink Member, Patron Provider

    Are you under a certain budget for this project?

    Are you more concerned about core count or more Ghz w/ less cores?

    What are your storage requirements too? Because if you dont need tons of storage space Nvme is the way to way to go. But again this all ties back to budget..

    Thanks,
    Ryan

  • jfracjfrac Member, Host Rep

    In ServeTheHome there is a thread about HPE Epyc 7nm deals, I think it was 1500USD for 16 core server. Power consumption is super low. On ebay Xeon E5 v3 is starting to get cheap, but these are 22nm furnaces.

  • randvegetarandvegeta Member, Host Rep
    edited March 2020

    @oplink said:
    Are you under a certain budget for this project?

    Are you more concerned about core count or more Ghz w/ less cores?

    What are your storage requirements too? Because if you dont need tons of storage space Nvme is the way to way to go. But again this all ties back to budget..

    Thanks,
    Ryan

    I dont have a particular budget in mind. At least not on a per machine basis. I'm probably looking to drop about $10K into a starter cluster which needs to be expandable.

    My storage setup will be an SSD SAN over 10G. Or possibly 2x 10G. I dont want onboard storage.

    Our current clusters are mostly Xeon E5. We separate the clusters by version, so we have a V1, V2 and V4 cluster. Some of our SANs are share by multiple clusters (i.e. we have a SAN used by both our V1 and V2 cluster). These nodes typically dual socket (16-20 physical cores) and 128GB RAM each. They're good machines actually, and seems like CPU is not really an issue given they're never maxed out. As such, we've had a preference to just keep adding more nodes to our cluster. But I'm weary of continuing to use HW that was discontinued 5 years ago.

    Normally the latest cutting edge stuff is not very economical to run. But there should be some middle ground hardware that suits our needs. Something that has plenty of CPU power, supports a good amount of RAM (and ideally not too expensive RAM), and more energy efficient.

    We run our own DC in HK, and actually we are no so much limited by space, but power, and to an extent cooling. Our current nodes are all 2U, but actually 4U is perfectly acceptable for us, and that may mean lesser cooling requirements.

    jfrac said: In ServeTheHome there is a thread about HPE Epyc 7nm deals, I think it was 1500USD for 16 core server. Power consumption is super low. On ebay Xeon E5 v3 is starting to get cheap, but these are 22nm furnaces.

    16 core seems a bit low. The E5s are not THAT power hungry. We have dual socket nodes running at 200 watts or less while under load. That's not bad. And those are running 2 sockets, so 32-40 cores. Or is that 16 real cores? In which case my E5s are going tobe 16-20 real cores... What kind of power we talking about here on those EPYCs?

    Honestly though, the E5s are getting pretty damned cheap. And if you go for the v1 or v2 variants, RAM is also pretty inexpensive if you have enough DIMM slots.

    But if I can get more capacity, better performance and less power consumption, then that would be ideal.

  • oplinkoplink Member, Patron Provider

    We are too in the process of overhauling some nodes. I have been looking at this a lot too. Intel Scalable line is just so bloated its annoying.

    With the amount of cores AMD has now, you really have two good options to build a node to save money. Go single CPU and get as many cores as any dual E5 Build. Or go heavy and do dual Epyc with insane cores. Its really going to allow you to put more clients per node/per core.

    Here is a good chart of the Epyc:

    Check out the 7302, its a good balance of cores and clock speed.

    A good barebone to start from would be the supermicro 1013S-MTR for a single cpu build since you dont need hardly any local storage. Or 2u AS-2013S-C0R

    One thing that still concerns me with AMD is Bios updates and micro-code updates. Plus just general software/kernel issues with AMD support. Usually working with supremicro has been good about bios updates for us. Its nice to save money and get more cores though.

    Thanks
    Ryan

    Thanked by 1skbenterprise
  • oplinkoplink Member, Patron Provider

    note: If you go single CPU, you want 7302P model#

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