Better choice for ESXi = Xeon D vs C3000 Atom

[michal168]

Hello,
I haven't seen any similar thread just for ESXi so I wanted to create one.
I am wondering which platform should I go for my ESXi homelab server for learning.

Xeon D-1541 = 8cores/16threads - its about 16.8 GHz on ESXi to utilize, with HT it will double or what?

Atom C3955 = 16cores/16threads = 33.6 GHz on ESXi

How do you think which one will be better for virtualization host? How will you compare those two concerning ESXi work? How many VMs they will be able to run simultaneously?

Cheers!

Michal

 

[T_Minus]

I think you haven't seen threads because the C3000 are very hard to acquire now and most for home labs will spend way less money getting E5 v1/v2 systems than XeonD or C3000, and have more resources available at lower cost. (But higher operating power)

Also, what the VMs do will help answer that question.

1 Xeon D Core != 1 C3000 Core so you need to go beyond cores/frequency and make sure they do what you want

 

[Patrick]

Single thread performance of the Xeon D is much better. If you want to do vMotion to a Xeon E5 V4, for example, you are going to want the Xeon D.

GHz to GHz is not a direct comparison. For example, you do not have L3 cache on the Atom.

 

[michal168]

thanks for your answers
My workflow will consist of few Windows with AD/DNS/SQL which will run simultaneously and few other which I will power up when I will need them for eg. RHEL cluster with RHV/Cloudforms, some Linux for Ansible learning, most of VMs will be linux but only for learning, no production workflow at all. I would like to run also FreeNas or OMV for NAS on my apartment.

 

[Evan]

See my reply to other threads also but given the same $$, Both being Low TDP and power consuming I would alsways go for the little Xeon, that is Xeon-D over the C3000.

I have d-1540 system and it’s great for your use case I think. I run some file shares, a few random linux based VM’s for monitoring for admin purposes, I have spun up a vitual openstack install sometimes. My Xeon-D system is 128gb ram though. C2000 was absolutely never going to be considered when I built that system.

Now C3000 does have 2 small advantages, it’s maximum power when running flatout will be less, look at the reviews let’s say 60w vs 100w, but at idle pretty similar so really makes little difference.

If you have massive SATA storage needs C3000 has more sata3 ports, but if power is a consideration anyway you should be using 8 or 10tb helium drives so hopefully don’t even need that many ports