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New ESXi Build - Xeon E3 or E5?

K

Kersk

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jun 22, 2003
Messages
129
I'm trying to plan out a new build for all my home server needs -- this will be my first ESXi build. Virtualization seems to have really matured and has a ton of advantages, so I'm ready to make the jump. I have an old WHS box that has been annoying me and I want to retire it, and I also need to setup a proper home dev staging ground for testing my game dev projects. I'm planning on using 9-10 VMs total.

My dilemma right now is choosing between a Xeon E3 and Xeon E5 build.

Ideally, I'd like to use the newer E5's, but with the current pricing right now I can basically put together 3 complete E3-1230 servers for about the same price as one server with dual E5-2620's.

The E3 option would give me 12C/24T @ 3.2ghz + 48gb total ram
The E5 option would give me 12C/24T @ 2.0ghz + 64gb total ram

The E5 option would have much more affordable future ram upgrade options and come with SAS ports, but it seems like I'd be giving up a huge amount of raw processing power going from 3.2ghz down to 2.0ghz. The E3 setup is also known to work great with ESXi, whereas the E5's are bleeding edge and I'd be more likely to run into some issues. I'm also suspicious that even if the clock speed difference wasn't there, it would still be better to split up the VMs across physically different host systems and avoid some amount of virtualization overhead -- ie, the 3x E3's would have 3x dual NICs instead of just 1 dual NIC, etc.

If I go with the E5 option I'd do an all-in-one OI+napp-it ZFS build, and if I go with the E3 option I guess I'd do the same on one of the E3 systems and just share out the storage to the other E3 systems over NFS on a separate gigabit vlan. I don't have very demanding storage space requirements, but I will be doing some disk intensive stuff from time to time and I'd like it to be reasonably fast. Right now I've got 4x 1TB drives that I can salvage from my WHS server and 2 SSD's that I picked up on sale recently. If I did anything more, I'd probably just pick up 2 more 1TB drives for a raid-z/2 setup.

Another option altogether could be to wait until the E5-16xx chips and single socket 2011 server motherboards fully hit the market and see what the pricing is like on those. Maybe even wait until E3 v2.

I can technically wait, but I'd like to get going on this build asap though. I have no physical space requirements, but I do have sound requirements since I'll be storing all this in my small apartment -- I'm thinking of getting a cheap 18u rack to keep it organized and 4u cases with quiet 120mm fans to keep my sanity.

The price breakdown is:

Xeon E5:
$419 - Xeon E5-2620
$419 - Xeon E5-2620
$499 - Supermicro X9DR3-F-O
$127 - 16GB 2x8
$127 - 16GB 2x8
$127 - 16GB 2x8
$127 - 16GB 2x8
$50 - PSU
$100 - Case
---------
$1998 - 12C/24T @ 2.0ghz - 64GB ram

Xeon E3:
$384 - Xeon E3-1230 + Supermicro X9SCM-F-O
$69 - 8GB 2x4
$69 - 8GB 2x4
$50 - PSU
$100 - Case
---------
$672 - 4C/8T @ 3.2ghz - 16GB
x3
---------
$2016 - 12C/24T @ 3.2ghz - 48GB ram

The prices might vary a bit depending on if I want to get something like a Norco-4xxx for future storage options, or if I want to use SAS, etc.

Thoughts? What are you guys building for your ESXi home labs and home servers now that the E5's are available?
 
Crap. Nope, didn't even consider that.

That just biases it further towards sticking with the E3's.
 
Kersk said:
Crap. Nope, didn't even consider that.

That just biases it further towards sticking with the E3's.
Click to expand...

Or ditching ESXi for another free hypervisor.

To the original question ... for learning about virtualization,
I have and would build out two identical hosts + dedicated shared storage.

For simple consolidation, I have used a single beefy server with local storage.

In your case, you sound like a candidate for the latter.
 
Any ideas for the dedicated shared storage? I've looked at QNAP / Synology... they seem like decent units, but it just seems much more cost efficient to build out another system though.

I'm leaning towards building two E3-1230 systems, with one of them managing the storage for now. Then in the future either adding a dedicated storage device, a third E3-1230, or maybe prices on the E5's will be down to a more competitive level around this time.
 
I'm sure they're really good, but they are also like $3k for a diskless unit which is running an i3-2120.

It just seems much more cost effective to build my own with a norco-4220 and another E3-1230 for a more powerful system.
 
Netwerkz101 said:
Or ditching ESXi for another free hypervisor.

To the original question ... for learning about virtualization,
I have and would build out two identical hosts + dedicated shared storage.

For simple consolidation, I have used a single beefy server with local storage.

In your case, you sound like a candidate for the latter.
Click to expand...

xen = unlimited :)
 
Kersk said:
Any ideas for the dedicated shared storage? I've looked at QNAP / Synology... they seem like decent units, but it just seems much more cost efficient to build out another system though.

I'm leaning towards building two E3-1230 systems, with one of them managing the storage for now. Then in the future either adding a dedicated storage device, a third E3-1230, or maybe prices on the E5's will be down to a more competitive level around this time.
Click to expand...


I'm a big Synology fan..work great. Totally stable and reliable. Sure it's cheaper to roll your own....but it just depends what you want to do.
 
If the price premium for one was lower or if I had a larger budget to work with I would definitely consider it, but they are simply too expensive for me to justify right now.
 
this is a lab. IMO you should protect your data with raid (software raid is okay) and move on. Unless your going to be learning the in and outs of vmware I would software raid and move on.

sans or shared storage is really not needed in my mind. If you need to move a VM to a data store to data store copy over your GB network. It will take time but works.
 
Well, I'm just trying to get the best performance for my money. I won't be putting the disks under constant load over long durations very frequently, but when I do stress the I/O, I'll be using it pretty intensively and I'll want it to be as fast as possible. I feel like I have to do some sort of shared storage since I'll be using so many VMs though. Maybe I can try a hybrid approach of having two different shared pools, one large RAID-Z pool with all my 1TB drives, and a smaller mirrored pool with my 2 SSD's for performance sensitive data. Does anyone know how the "all-in-one" VM'ed OI/napp-it route performs with SSD's?
 
So I bit on the E3's!

I've got 2x E3-1230 systems coming, I think that will give me more than enough power for now.

BTW, Newegg has a combo deal for the E3-1230 + X9SCM-F-O for $384... I just couldn't justify passing that up.
 
Thanks for the heads up on that combo deal! Been looking at that combo for awhile and also couldn't pass it up.
 
If you need 8gb UDIMMs to get your server to 32gb, the lowest price I've found is at superbiiz: http://www.superbiiz.com/query.php?...-SDRAM-Server-240-Pins&pa2=8GB&pa7=NO&pa6=Yes

It's still really expensive though -- 4x4gb is about half the price of 2x8gb. I'm going to bite the bullet and fill up one server with 4x8gb but keep the other server at 4x4gb for now. That's one area where an E5 would have been nice. Much cheaper ram. :(
 
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