• Some users have recently had their accounts hijacked. It seems that the now defunct EVGA forums might have compromised your password there and seems many are using the same PW here. We would suggest you UPDATE YOUR PASSWORD and TURN ON 2FA for your account here to further secure it. None of the compromised accounts had 2FA turned on.
    Once you have enabled 2FA, your account will be updated soon to show a badge, letting other members know that you use 2FA to protect your account. This should be beneficial for everyone that uses FSFT.

Q6600 use in a Virtualized Environment

Q

Quickstrike

Weaksauce
Joined
Nov 25, 2009
Messages
71
I am [soon] going to purchase a Sandy Bridge system to replace my old Q6600, 8 gigs of ram PC.

Originally, I was looking at using something like an Intel X3450 w/ Supermicro server mobo to run VMware ESXi.. but now I am contemplating just turning the old Q6600 into a dedicated server.

I will be running several instances of Windows 2008 R2 - Domain Controller, SQL Server, Exchange 2010 Server, Lync 2010 Server.
There will only be a max of 15 users on these servers [if I get past the lab stage].
Might also dabble with Untangle UTM and Open Solaris ZFS.

Will the electricity savings & extra performance of the [newer] Xeon processor be worth it in my scenario?



Thanks.
 
What I like about the Nehalims (i7s or Xeons) is the motherboards with 6 RAM slots per socket. Even an i7 motherboard will give you that. With 6 RAM slots, you can add more RAM.

The workload on a system tends to be limited by two factors: RAM, and especially in the case of home labs, spindles. If you've got 5 VMs all contending for the same disk, that's gonna slow things down for I/O intense workloads. Raw CPU horsepower doesn't tend to be an issue.

With more RAM, you can run more VMs on fewer sytems, saving power (ZFS is particularly RAM hungry, they recommend at least a GB of RAM).
 
Do you have access to your current power consumption on that Q6600 setup? Keep in mind a hefty chunk of the power consumption lies with the chipset as well.

Once you get a idea of how much power your current system draws you can then do some rough numbers on how long it would take to recoup the costs from any power savings.

I concur on the CPU; that's usually not a problem unless you're running CPU intensive tasks which doesn't seem to be the case.
 
Almost forgot about this little project.

I will try the Q6600 setup first - right now it is in storage w/o a power source. I plan on buying a PSU for it tomorrow.

I had 3 instances of Windows Server 2k8 R2 running [something like Domain Controller, DNS, + SQL on one.. Exchange 2010 and Lync on another, the last was setup as an Edge server IIRC] + an Asterisk machine.

Would 3x 500gig drives be sufficient for I/O operations? Each Server 2k8 virtual machine on a different drive. Asterisk shares resources with the edge server.
Can use a spare 74 gig raptor or USB flash drive to boot up ESXi.

If I load VMWare Converter on my current i7 2600k PC, can I direct it to the 4 individual .vmx / .vmdk files and easily convert the vmware server files to a vmware esxi compatible format?



Thanks for the help.
 
Please let me know how the q6600 works out for you since my plans are much in line with yours.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top