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ESXi IvyBridge i5 vs i7 (hyperthreading)

A

af22

Gawd
Joined
Jun 21, 2010
Messages
610
I'm planning to upgrade my file server to something modern and mainstream.

I was looking at the LGA 1155 Ivy Bridge lineup.

Will going from a i5 3570 to an i7 3770 make a huge difference?

What about getting one of those 65 watt low power models, such as the i7 3770S?

Anyone recommend AMD Piledriver?

I'm not sure if i really need server grade hardware, as things are running fine on my E350 zacate. I just want more room to play.
 
For a file server - No, a slightly quicker CPU isn't going to give you any benefit. Our main Win 2k8 File server (300 users) is a 5 year old Xeon 3.0GHz and never gets over 20% CPU usage.

If it's running something that's maxing out the current CPU, then plan accordingly, but otherwise it looks like you just want to burn some money.
 
af22 said:
I'm planning to upgrade my file server to something modern and mainstream.

I was looking at the LGA 1155 Ivy Bridge lineup.

Will going from a i5 3570 to an i7 3770 make a huge difference?

What about getting one of those 65 watt low power models, such as the i7 3770S?

Anyone recommend AMD Piledriver?

I'm not sure if i really need server grade hardware, as things are running fine on my E350 zacate. I just want more room to play.
Click to expand...

The specs are too similar between the i5-3570 and i7-3770S, except:
L2 & L3 Cache, integrated HD graphics, and hyperthreading.

For file serving only ... I can't imagine you'd experience a difference that is noticeable.

Since you are posting in the VC sub forum, I am assuming your file server will be one of many VMs, no?
This is where a difference may be seen, but without knowing what the VMs will be doing and how many..too hard to tell.

Going to run 8+ VMs that require a good amount of processor use... go I7 with hyperthreading ...
and I'm just throiwing 8+ VMs as an random number ..no science.

The cost difference (at least by Egg prices) between the i7-3770
and the "S" model is too small not to go with the "S" option and save on the power bill some.

I am not up to speed on current AMD processors :confused:
 
Honestly I found no difference between AMD nor Intel when it comes to most server functions. I have a clusters with Intel 2X CPU and run 25 Servers I have a cluster with a 2 X AMD cpu, I ran benchmarks on performance on servers and so no difference. The only time your going to see any differences are in the VDI field, I found AMD performed better because I had 96 Cores available vs 24cores+Hyperthreading on an intell platform. The biggest issue with any virtualization is your storage, this is usually the biggest bottleneck I run across.
 
Basically, I have consolidated two physical E350 low power servers into a single E350 ESXi setup running both VM's.

Before when they were not virtualized. My 2008R2 server can easily spike to 90-100% cpu usage when i transfer a file over the network at full speed.

My second E350 server is an ubuntu LAMP server. It has cron jobs that run every hour, when processing the cron jobs it also spikes the cpu to 90-100% (however it doesn't need to run that fast at full power).

Since i'm in a single user environment at home, these machines idle all the time unless a cron job is running or i'm using it. Moving to the ESXi setup, the ESXi host has taken up quite a bit of my resources, probably 1.5GB RAM and up too 15% CPU overhead. Things are still running acceptably given the hardware.

I want room to have some play space where I can install other VM's!

What i'm curious is, if your running 3-4 VM's, and they are all "idleing". Does 4 VM's in idle state idle low enough for the CPU to also be in idle state? If each VM idles at 150 mhz, 4 VM idling would be ~ 600mhz right?
 
Essentials yes 600mhz. VMWare reqs are 1 gig of ram and 1 core for vsphere it self. If you think Vmware uses lots your should try hyperv
 
Either processor is overkill for what you're using it for IMO. Use the money from not upgrading the proc to get a SSD or more RAM or even a new NIC card.

For reference, I have a fx8120 running about 15 VMs, 4 of which are w2k8 R2 servers. I very rarely get above ~20% unless 1 VM strikes up an intensive process.
 
af22 said:
My 2008R2 server can easily spike to 90-100% cpu usage when i transfer a file over the network at full speed.
Click to expand...
What the what? On a VM?

That doesn't sound right at all. I just pulled a file from a single core VM (static 25% of an i5-2400) and the CPU spiked to 7% for about 2 seconds before dropping back to 3-4%.... W2k8 x64. Got 86MB/s average on 12GB.
 
Innocence said:
What the what? On a VM?

That doesn't sound right at all. I just pulled a file from a single core VM (static 25% of an i5-2400) and the CPU spiked to 7% for about 2 seconds before dropping back to 3-4%.... W2k8 x64. Got 86MB/s average on 12GB.
Click to expand...


I'm running on an AMD E350 Zacate, fanless 18 watt TDP. Your i5-2400 has 6x the cpu power. It's also doing software raid 5, raid 1, and raid 0 across 8 hard drives.
 
af22 said:
I'm running on an AMD E350 Zacate, fanless 18 watt TDP. Your i5-2400 has 6x the cpu power. It's also doing software raid 5, raid 1, and raid 0 across 8 hard drives.
Click to expand...
That is quite the tiny CPU, but 80-100% just for disk transactions still seems pretty high.

And I'm very interested - what are you using for soft-RAID with ESXi?
 
Innocence said:
That is quite the tiny CPU, but 80-100% just for disk transactions still seems pretty high.

And I'm very interested - what are you using for soft-RAID with ESXi?
Click to expand...

I'm using server 2008R2. All my physical hard drives are passed into the ESXi VM with virtual rdm.

Inside windows, all hard drives are windows dynamic drives.

The 4x 2TB are set in raid 5

The 2x 1TB drives are partitioned so half the drive is raid 0, the other half raid 1.

In the beginning, i had always wanted to try ZFS, but all my data was already on NTFS and it was really simple for me to keept it NTFS. Also, if my files erver ever dies. I can import the entire raid array into my windows 7 desktop to recover files.
 
af22 said:
I'm using server 2008R2. All my physical hard drives are passed into the ESXi VM with virtual rdm.

Inside windows, all hard drives are windows dynamic drives.

The 4x 2TB are set in raid 5

The 2x 1TB drives are partitioned so half the drive is raid 0, the other half raid 1.

In the beginning, i had always wanted to try ZFS, but all my data was already on NTFS and it was really simple for me to keept it NTFS. Also, if my files erver ever dies. I can import the entire raid array into my windows 7 desktop to recover files.
Click to expand...
Ohhhhh, Windows"RAID". Let me lose my lunch then....

I'd say a very worthwhile investment would be a proper RAID controller.
 
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