CPU Question

[Azhrarn]

Hi,

I am mainly a lurker of Servethehome.
Lately colleagues of the ServerTeam have made requests at multiple vendors for new servers and some equipment.
One of them being Dell.
For our compute environment (Mainly VSphere they propose us to buy around twenty of R640 Servers with dual Xeon Gold 6246R and 12 * 64GB DIMM's.
I am honestly quite astonished, I thought they would propose R6525 with AMD EPYC 75F3's...
or at least Third gen Xeon Scalable.
Any reasons I don't see why they would propose that?

Friendly greetings,

 

[USER189364]

So, it is hard to establish intent without just going to ask, but I could guess at many things. Perhaps there are existing servers/Spare parts on hand and wish to easily allow for hot swap without having to purchase and keep track of a whole other set of hot swap?

Perhaps they ran numbers that this came out ahead for price/performance for their use case?

Perhaps they are an Intel shop and have... strong preferences in that direction?

Really tough to guess based just on their requisition request.

There ARE valid reasons to go Intel, both hard reasons and soft reasons. Most simple approach is just reach out and ask them, in a friendly way; "Hey guys, I noticed these are slightly older Intel boxes; just my curiosity, what prompted that direction?"

I have found SysAdmins are fine with explaining, as long as you do not go in with the wrong approach (accusing/Questioning their decision; better to make it clear it is so you can learn, rather than try and demand explanations)

 

[Azhrarn]

Well the thing is we gave Dell free reign in the decisions. Just make us a proposal as they see fit. We just indicated we are VMWare/Oracle shop when talking about Compute. The server team has not given any reason to avoid AMD. That is why I am so astonished in this proposal...
Our best servers are actually HPE DL 380 G10 (Xeon Scalable Gen 1) so I don't see the spare part play a role here.
Concerning reaching out, we have meet (me as network specialist) next thursday. I was just curious. I thought I had it figured out with the 75F3's considering the license costs of VMWare/Microsoft/..... Not mentioning Oracle (F$cking nightmare!)

 

[i386]

My guess: avalability

 

[Azhrarn]

Well, I got my answer from Dell. And it is actually both...
There is no new Xeon Gold 3rd Gen SKU with 16 cores, faster as the 6246R. They are actually all slower!
Also, there is availability. The 6246R can be had quite easily, but for the 63xxx series it seems harder for Dell.

 

[RolloZ170]

but for the 63xxx series it seems harder for Dell.

6326 & 6346 are in stock. but i think dell don't buy at amazon&co LOL.