Light virtualization server now that cards are out

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KioskAdmin

KioskAdmin

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Jan 20, 2015
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What are people getting for their next new servers?

Xeon Silver 4108 4110 4112 4114
Xeon D 1541
Atom C3758
Xeon E3 1240
EPYC

What's the top on your mind and why?

I'm gonna be doing a personal build next months. I've gotta get my vision down now that there's so much more in the market today.
 
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Evan

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Jan 6, 2016
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Ok, so I have some older gen stuff...
Xeon-D 1540 and mix of things like NUC etc... upgrading as soon as I can find an ATX of mATX case I can live with size and looks wise as in appartment not rack.

For me I feel Xeon-D or e5 v4 / silver scalable.
What more important to you ? Able to upgrade later and pcie slots or is size more important ?

Size a consideration Xeon-D hands down for me over the c3000 just due to the single core performance advantage. mITX and the masses of case options it allows.

Otherwise if expandability and upgrade possibilities are a bit more important e5 v4 / silver.
I like silver 4114 as the best value proposition above a D-1541, or the older e5-2640v4

E3 I have one concern, that is the memory, less useful and harder to find. RDIMM over UDIMM any day.
 
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Eric Faden

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Dec 5, 2016
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I have the D. Although the new atom on interesting. For my usage I can't justify the cost bump to silver yet.

Sent from my Pixel XL using Tapatalk
 
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Evan

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Jan 6, 2016
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Oh one thing against the new Xeon's is cooling... don't think there is any interesting active cooling that's very quiet and so far no mention of any water cooling blocks yet, this may make a non rack build a bit harder but I am sure the cooling solutions will come soon.
 
MiniKnight

MiniKnight

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Mar 30, 2012
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If you're doing storage + virtualization then you're buying $600 to $1200 in RAM. You're buying $2000 in storage. Xeon D is the head scratcher for me. Why would I want a higher power chip than Atom but lower performance than Silver?
 
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Evan

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Jan 6, 2016
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MiniKnight said:
If you're doing storage + virtualization then you're buying $600 to $1200 in RAM. You're buying $2000 in storage. Xeon D is the head scratcher for me. Why would I want a higher power chip than Atom but lower performance than Silver?
Click to expand...
Today your probably right but certianly when I started with Xeon-D it was low power had 10G and ram was cheaper. A few months ago this was a much harder question.

Thing is we assume silver will idle close to a Xeon-D and that's only a few watts above a c3000 high end.

I was originally going to build some e5 v4 and I am trying to convince myself I should not get silver 4114, memory on mATX boards is 192gb instead of 128gb with e5 using 32gb dimms
 
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i386

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Mar 18, 2016
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KioskAdmin said:
What are people getting for their next new servers?
Click to expand...
Definitely not a Xeon D or other cpus with <= 16 pcie lanes. Xeon D is power full enough for 10gbe, but If you want to try rdma for faster networks you lose at least one x8 slot to the add on nic.
I will get at least an e5 xeon (or equivalent skylake or epyc cpu) with 40(+) pcie lanes.
 
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Evan

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Jan 6, 2016
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Racks of production servers is a complete different discussion though... dual e5 / scalable all the way for general duties for most people I am sure.
I have never seen yet Xeon-D / e3 / c2000 used in enterprise outside of appliances, I know that in some big web shops these things do get used (eg Facebook or Netflix) but for normal enterprise maybe people use it but I have never heard about it. No OEM has Xeon-D servers like HPE, Lenovo, Cisco etc, in their regular product ranges they are all E5/scalable and Low end some e3. (Again HP has some special use managed service small business stuff with Xeon-D but that's it)
 
realtomatoes

realtomatoes

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Oct 3, 2016
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Evan said:
Racks of production servers is a complete different discussion though... dual e5 / scalable all the way for general duties for most people I am sure.
Click to expand...
yep. all e5 across the board even on small remote sites with less than 10 hosts in our environment. don't think we even considered e3 for the remote sites.
 
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Evan

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Jan 6, 2016
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Won't see a 10nm shrink for a while on any CPU's
Maybe could see a Skylake core at some point not too far away.

Can't really fault the current CPU's as all they really miss is AVX512. Certainly they are already 14nm so efficiency wise pretty good, a new core won't help too much only a shrink will.
 
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