Fast Single Core in a 1U Chassis?

[BigHye]

I need help figuring out what hardware is shipping and available that I can use to build a new rack mountable 1U form factor server/workstation class machine with dual power supplies. It will be used as a Build Server to execute software compilations and tests. I currently run these on multiple hardware platforms using either an Intel Xeon E5-2690 v2 / Xeon E5-2680 v4 attached to a PureStorage All Flash storage array. I’ve benchmarked a single build running on a host without anything else running at 40 min with the CPU at 100% of a single core during the run. Performance is the same if I use a local SSD/NVMe drive. Running 5 concurrent builds on the same host take ~45 min so the bottleneck appears to be the CPU clock performance.

My goal is to increase the single build performance by using CPUs with faster core frequencies and leverage Turbo boost and buy multiple servers to scale-out.

Budget: Under $5,000
I'm looking to get quality new parts as this machine will be under heavy constant use.

Base Requirements:
Single Socket, ~4-6-8 Cores w/ High Frequency & Turbo Boost
64/128GB RAM
NVMe 512/1TB Drive w/ good write performance
IPMI Support (OS is VMware ESXi)
Dual power supplies (Must have for this use case)

Challenges:
1. 1U Case & Motherboard with IPMI and Dual Power Supplies?
A friend has offered to host this in their datacenter but requires redundant power supplies. The OS is going to be VMware ESXi so basic IPMI support is necessary. These requirements limit the type of motherboard / socket type that I'm able to use which then limits the CPU.

It's been over a decade since I've built a Server vs buy from Dell/HP so any help here would be much appreciated. Do I want to buy a Case/Motherboard combo from Supermicro or try to find them separately like I would a desktop build?

2. What CPU should I build this around?
I'm open to ALL suggestions but Needs to be available to ship in January 2020.

- i9-9900KS (Coffee Lake Refresh - Socket 1151 - 8c/16t - 4GHz / 5GHz Turbo)
- Xeon E-2288G (Coffee Lake Refresh - Socket 1151 - 8c/16t - 3.7GHz / 5GHz Turbo)
- Xeon W-3225 (Cascade Lake - Socket 3647 - 8c/16t - 3.7GHz / 4.3GHz Turbo)

 

[EffrafaxOfWug]

What's the bottleneck in the build process that limits it to only one core...? In my experience software builds are normally happy to chow down on as much CPU, memory and IO as you're capable of throwing at them.

And the OS is ESXi? Is this a host running a single guest or are there other VMs as well?

If that and a single-threaded build process really are the limitations then the E-2288G would be my choice simply for the boost speed, but from what other people on this forum have posted they seem to be very hard to come by in the retail market so I think you'd be lucky to get one within a fortnight...

 

[amalurk]

Here is a 2186G that could ship immediately, replace SSD and it meets your specs?
Edit: Hmm Dell Outlet direct links not working, Search on R340s there are some with 2186G processor. One I saw at 64ram, dual power supplies, was like $1900 or so.

 

[BigHye]

What's the bottleneck in the build process that limits it to only one core...? In my experience software builds are normally happy to chow down on as much CPU, memory and IO as you're capable of throwing at them.

And the OS is ESXi? Is this a host running a single guest or are there other VMs as well?

If that and a single-threaded build process really are the limitations then the E-2288G would be my choice simply for the boost speed, but from what other people on this forum have posted they seem to be very hard to come by in the retail market so I think you'd be lucky to get one within a fortnight...

The two main jobs are (1) CI/CD jobs that even though they are multi threaded, they still take a long time to complete before the next step of the job can run and (2) build of Windows 2016/2019 ISO with the latest updates slipstreamed to speed up VM builds. Its sad that even in Windows 2019 the windows update installer is single threaded so even if a VM has 2/4/8/16 cores, it doesn't use more than 1 core.

The box these jobs currently run on don't have many other VMs running at a time to compete for CPU. I've tested it with a single VM running vs four VM's and the times are pretty identical leading me to believe the core speed is the limiting factor.

 

[DanielWood]

I think you are probably on the right track here with wanting high single thread performance, but other performance optimization targets are going to be storage and memory. Consider getting an Optane for the storage to get a big boost from low latency access times and also consider getting the highest frequency supported/tightest timing RAM you can find.

Since you mentioned Windows update, you have killed all antivirus/defender real-time during the Windows updates, right? That makes a MASSIVE difference in CPU usage of Windows updates as well as mounting/building WIM files.

For Defender, this one PowerShell line does the trick:

Set-MpPreference -DisableRealtimeMonitoring $true

 

[BigHye]

Here is a 2186G that could ship immediately, replace SSD and it meets your specs?
Edit: Hmm Dell Outlet direct links not working, Search on R340s there are some with 2186G processor. One I saw at 64ram, dual power supplies, was like $1900 or so.

Thanks for the suggestion! I pulled the trigger on a Dell R340 w/ 2186G, 64GB RAM, X710 Dual 10Gig, 2x240GB SSD with 5yr support for $2200.

Hopefully this will make a difference with my workload.