Recommendations for cheap socket 1366 boards? (UK)

[jSherz]

I'm looking at the feasibility of building a small OpenStack cluster and am trying to price up some small, preferably low power, nodes to run various components (around 5 nodes total).

Currently I have a dual E5-2670 server that will be cannibalised for a compute node but I'm trying to save money with the remaining machines by going back to socket 1366 with a low energy Xeon (e.g. Intel Xeon L5640s)

Please could you recommend some boards to look for or places to look? My default so far is always to go via the Supermicro website to find their offering but I have trouble finding the equivalent for other brands.

Alternatively, am I barking up completely the wrong tree by building individual (probably 1U) servers? From a brief bit of eBaying / Googling, blade servers seem to be rather pricey and very loud (not something that my other half would approve of)!

 

[vrod]

Unless you have a compatibility level configured in openstack (like VMware EVC), I would not recommend that you use westmere cpu's together with Sandy Bridge in the same cluster. You might run into issues for vm's started on the SB host when you want to migrate them to the westmere host.

This is due to that SB has newer/different CPU instructionsets which might conflict with the westmere. Otherwise with the low price for 2670's I don't know why you wouldn't go for another pair of these.

 

[jSherz]

Unless you have a compatibility level configured in openstack (like VMware EVC), I would not recommend that you use westmere cpu's together with Sandy Bridge in the same cluster. You might run into issues for vm's started on the SB host when you want to migrate them to the westmere host.

This is due to that SB has newer/different CPU instructionsets which might conflict with the westmere. Otherwise with the low price for 2670's I don't know why you wouldn't go for another pair of these.

In that case, I'd be tempted to use the SB server for another purpose and then buy something similar to a Dell PowerEdge C6100 for the OpenStack nodes. Thanks for the help.