Intel Xeon D-1500 Series Discussion

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smitty2k1

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For a simple file server using Unraid: Amazon.com: Samsung 950 PRO Series - 256GB PCIe NVMe - M.2 Internal SSD (MZ-V5P256BW): Computers & Accessories

The new SM961 is coming out but the price of the 950 Pro is falling so I wouldn't worry about it.

RAM: Just get 2x 16GB DDR4 RDIMM off of ebay: SAMSUNG 16GB PC4-2133P PC4-17000R DDR4 REG-ECC DIMM M393A2G40DB0-CPB
Thanks!!! RAM looks good but that SSD seems way to expensive. Over half the price of the motherboard and CPU. Cache drives in unRaid don't do much and I'm not sure I need anything larger than 128GB.
 

MiniKnight

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smitty2k1

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Ok you got me looking. Maybe 256GB is better since 2x capacity for 50% more:
Toshiba Samsung SSD PM951 M.2 256GB PCIe NVMe MZ-VLV256D MZVLV256HCHP-000D1

Or even cheaper (but a less good drive) MZVLV128HCGR Samsung PM951 128GB NVMe PCIe M.2 SSD, PCI Express Gen3
I ended up going with this one: Amazon.com: Kingston Digital HyperX Predator 240 GB PCIe Gen2 x4 Solid State Drive 8-Inch SHPM2280P2H/240G: Computers & Accessories

Because it was $30 off for prime day (Yay Amazon Visa CC) and it comes with a PCIe adapter so I can use it in my older system until I update my motherboard.
 

MikeChristie

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Jul 27, 2016
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I've just read through about 40 pages of this thread. I'm very excited about the Xeon D boards to replace my i5-2405S based home server. My home server is running mostly NAS and Plex duties, but also going to be playing with Hyper-V or VMWare. I've run Openmediavault for NAS and Plex duties up until recently, but I'm now running Windows 2012R2 Datacenter.

I had bought a stack of old X8STi Supermicro boards and some cheap-as-chips Xeons for my lab, but I'm now thinking of chucking them all out and getting a couple of Xeon-D systems to give me plenty enough stuff to play with in a much smaller footprint and much lower power needs.

I'm a little concerned about Plex performance with these boards, as I have quite a few HEVC videos and transcoding one of those in Plex will max out the i5.

I don't think the budget will stretch to a 16 core board, but I'd love to know where all the 1567s are going as I could probably stretch the budget to the sort of price I think they'd go for. That said, that price would look to be around the same price as two of the 6 core boards, which is looking an intriguing prospect. I like the look of the X10SDV-6C+-TLN4F as a good happy medium all round, with a decent number of cores, and a high clock, at a price where I'd consider buying another one later.

I change my mind on an almost hourly basis, but that's half the fun of planning a new adventure in gadgeteering.

I'm likely to settle on something like, one of the mITX SM boards, in a DS380, with a 8 port HBA to drive the 8x3.5" drives and 4 x SSDs running off the onboard SATA. That's the config I keep coming back to after wandering off into mad realms of Lian Li Q35s with 20 2.5" drives in hotswap bays. Current thinking, even though they're not NAS drives, is to go for Toshiba X300 6Tb drives. I had a bit of a 'mare with WD Reds when two of four failed when I was working away from home, so hadn't noticed.

I'd be happy to hear any observations or advice or hints about any pending hardware releases that might make me reconsider!
 
Apr 13, 2016
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I've just read through about 40 pages of this thread. I'm very excited about the Xeon D boards to replace my i5-2405S based home server. My home server is running mostly NAS and Plex duties, but also going to be playing with Hyper-V or VMWare. I've run Openmediavault for NAS and Plex duties up until recently, but I'm now running Windows 2012R2 Datacenter.

....

I'd be happy to hear any observations or advice or hints about any pending hardware releases that might make me reconsider!
Hi Mike,

There are several builds in the DIY section that you could take a look at. Here's the link to mine: X10SDV-4C-7TP4F (Xeon D-1518) Build

I can't really comment on any "stress" testing of Plex, but for my in the home needs it hasn't even blinked. I've been pleased as can be with this system.

Best regards!
-A
 
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Nik-

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Hey Guys,

I am looking for a server which is able to push 10g. The server will be used for media (live/video) streaming (not local, but over the internet) and my plan was to have 4x 4TB HDDs with 2x SSDs as cache so that I can serve videos and livestreaming files from the HDDs which are cached in RAM/SSD. I will be using BSD with ZFS so I want to go for the full 128GBs of RAM.

I am asking myself if the Xeon D is suited for my use case? Price is a concern and I am also aware of the Dual E5 2670 builds etc but I don't need the CPU power and I think in the end it will be more expensive than a new Xeon D build (?). The plus would be the more RAM I could put in these for caching, but I think this will be far above my budget... Are there any other options?

Any suggestions what would be best for my use case?

Thanks!!
 

Patrick

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Is this a write once read many workload @Nik- ?

Also, where is the server going to be located? The Xeon D build will use significantly less power than a dual E5-2670 V1 build so there is a good chance you will save enough on power to make up the difference in initial costs. Still, power will be dwarfed by bandwidth costs.

Here is a thread you may be interested in: Sharing my growth in the datacenter
 

Nik-

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Basically. I am currently running several webservers and vms with a BSD ZFS based SAN with shitty slow HDDs but since they have enough breathing room (RAM wise) they are blazing fast since everything is RAM+SSD cached. I am hoping to achieve the same with that streaming machine, imagine hundreds of videos hosted on the HDDs and probably only 1% will be viewed at the same time so they would be cached and could be pushed through 2x 10G. That's at least what I am hoping... If anyone of you guys has done something similar I am all ears... :)

Thanks for the link, I just fear the 64GB Ram a E3 would provide me won't be enough for caching, but I think this should be the cheapest option I have. Now I am not sure if the E3 isn't enough to get started, hmm...

Server(s) will be colocated in Frankfurt, Germany. I am not sure yet in which DC but I will probably go with Voxility (Equinix) since Traffic is cheap and they have probably the best network suited for streaming.
 

Scott Laird

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You want to push 10g from one server? If you're spending enough to get 10 gbps, then I'd consider getting a few more servers, for redundancy if nothing else.

Next, I'd be wary about depending on HDDs for much of anything; at *best* they'd be good for 1 Gbps each, but with even a trivial number of seeks that'll drop to almost nothing. Unless something has changed recently, ZFS's L2ARC on SSD gets cleared on reboot, which means that you'll take a massive performance hit on reboot, and probably won't be able to recover under load.

I suppose it all depends on your use case, but you'd be *much* better off if most of your streaming is out of RAM, with most of the rest coming directly from SSD and only a handful of streams at a time per HDD.
 

Jason Smith

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I have a homelab R710 with 2 x5650s and 144 GB RAM. I run several VMs (AD, SQL, 2 Citrix DDcs, 2 SF, Netscaler VPX, synology disktation among others. Could I replace this with a server built with a Xeon D 1541 or 1548?
 

Patrick

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I have a homelab R710 with 2 x5650s and 144 GB RAM. I run several VMs (AD, SQL, 2 Citrix DDcs, 2 SF, Netscaler VPX, synology disktation among others. Could I replace this with a server built with a Xeon D 1541 or 1548?
You are limited by the amount of RAM (128GB) in these platforms.

But the other way to think of it: a small cluster of Xeon D nodes can be more interesting.
 

Davewolfs

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Just ordered some memory. M393A4K40BB0-CPB and got M393A4K40BB0-CPB0Q any idea what the difference is?
 

QueBall

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Just ordered some memory. M393A4K40BB0-CPB and got M393A4K40BB0-CPB0Q any idea what the difference is?
The 0Q at the end of the part number is different.

Here is a slightly out of date guide on the Samsung part numbers
http://www.samsung.com/global/busin...ort/part_number_decoder/DDR3_SDRAM_Module.pdf
It does not have the current DDR4 numbering scheme but you can see the general logic on what is significant about the part numbers.

In your case. Nothing is different. Judging by what I could see, they made a small change in the factory at some point and all the newer ones are CPB0Q. Probably just something like switching to a larger die size or newer process to lower defect rates. If it makes manufacturing more efficient it just means lower prices as they get better at producing this stuff. New part number is likely just so they can tell them apart for warranty tracking.

Spec sheets show zero functional differences. So they will work exactly the same as older ones.
 

fruitcake

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Basically. I am currently running several webservers and vms with a BSD ZFS based SAN with shitty slow HDDs but since they have enough breathing room (RAM wise) they are blazing fast since everything is RAM+SSD cached. I am hoping to achieve the same with that streaming machine, imagine hundreds of videos hosted on the HDDs and probably only 1% will be viewed at the same time so they would be cached and could be pushed through 2x 10G. That's at least what I am hoping... If anyone of you guys has done something similar I am all ears... :)
So this is similar to a project we do. We've done benchmarks with the the 1541 and the 1518 from Supermicro. Each server has 4 Samsung 850 EVO 500GB drives in RAID0 as local movie storage and a Supermicro 32GB SATADOM for the system with 64GB of RAM (2x32 in case we want to bump that up).

These servers provide HLS, MPEG-DASH and RTMP streaming using Wowza.

Through our testing we found the gigabit ethernet was our first bottleneck, switching to 10gbps ethernet we pushed up to 3000 clients playing the same file and then different files. On the 1518, the 3000 different streams was our limit and mostly that was disk IO, all 4 SSDs where maxed on reads while CPU was sitting around 80% utilisation. Bit more RAM to cache more of the files in memory and I think we could probably hit 3500 streams before maxing the CPU. Our testing showed the 1541 had about twice the CPU capacity under this test, same IO limitations tho so for our case we're going 1518s all the way.

Grafana

Is a snapshot of the test on the 1518 with 3000 clients playing the same stream via RTSP, peaked at 6Gbps and 4Mpps. HLS streaming gets about 25% more streams out of the CPU but hits the same IO bottlenecks.

You're not going to need two 10Gbps connections
 

smitty2k1

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Anyone have RAM suggestions (sales) for the D1508 Pentium board? I need to upgrade my D525 atom board. Trying to decide 2x4GB or 2x8GB.

It looks like 2x8GB costs around $70 and 2x4GB costs around $60.

Would 8GB vs. 16GB make a difference transcoding a Plex stream? I think I only would need to do one stream at a time, but it would be best if I have the headroom to do two.
 
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Sic_Alpha

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I don't think RAM is your limiting factor here. Though for only $10 why wouldn't you double it? The D525 is going to be your issue for transcoding in Plex. I'm thinking not a chance for two streams, doubtful it will even handle one that well. D525 passmark score is ~700
What kind of CPU do I need for my Server?
 

smitty2k1

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I don't think RAM is your limiting factor here. Though for only $10 why wouldn't you double it? The D525 is going to be your issue for transcoding in Plex. I'm thinking not a chance for two streams, doubtful it will even handle one that well. D525 passmark score is ~700
What kind of CPU do I need for my Server?
Thanks for the response! Yes my current D525 is not sufficient but I think the D1508 will be. My question was really 8 vs 16 GB of RAM and what the expected costs would be. For $10 it's a no-brainer, but I was having a hard time finding 4GB sticks so I wasn't sure if there were less expensive options
 

Sic_Alpha

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I totally read over the 1508 remark in your post... :) For only $10 difference, definitely go for 16GB. More is always better when it comes to RAM. You may not be using it all at the moment, but your usage may change in the future. If the price delta was wider then I'd reconsider based upon your usage requirement. 8GB should be more than sufficient to handle two Plex streams however.

Thanks for the response! Yes my current D525 is not sufficient but I think the D1508 will be. My question was really 8 vs 16 GB of RAM and what the expected costs would be. For $10 it's a no-brainer, but I was having a hard time finding 4GB sticks so I wasn't sure if there were less expensive options
 
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