Upgrade Planning. Now I Have a Headache.

G

Good News Everyone

n00b
Joined
Nov 27, 2015
Messages
8
Hi,

I have an LGA2011 quad-core with X79. The primary use is development and it still sails along smoothly in my work, until I need to fire up some virtual machines and they happen to chew on stuff at the same time. Then I feel like it's a little bit sluggish. Still very doable for now.

What I'm pondering is how much more life Intel is going to give this socket. I have seen people on various forums say, "Yep, it's dead," but then they just reference other forum posts so it doesn't feel solid to me. Is my next upgrade going to be just a CPU or a new mobo on up?

My max RAM is 64. Based on how I use the VMs, I only need 3 VMs, and the max RAM will support 7. There's a ways to go.

For 2011, there are still 4 and 6-core CPUs left. Doesn't seem worth it, especially when Haswell offers more cores for cheaper it's like a discount on the mobo. But then there's the DDR4.

But what about Xeon? There is still stuff available all the way to 14 cores (I would not, just sayin'). Is it worth it to wait for the Xeons to drop in price instead of building Haswell from scratch?

Now I have a headache. :D

-GNE
 
What sort of storage are you keeping said VMs on?
And what kind of resources are you giving these VMs?

And yeah, if you're running all three of them at once, a Hyperthreading quad core is going to feel the burn.

And the Xeons might be a better fit for your needs, though they can be expensive. Going Xeon or going complete new-system Haswell is going to, likely, be pricey in any event. As for "go now" or "wait". It depends on your needs. If available and compatible, a Xeon should do what you need...NOW.



What motherboard are you running? Need to check compatibility.

Also, look at the Xeon pull prices on EBay (I hate directing people to EBay, but the prices there are simply too good to ignore).
 
The VMs are on a couple of HDDs. If I need it to be faster I can use my SSD, but I should mention that the sluggishness is CPU-bound. The chewing is builds, compiles and the like. The disk I/O is still pretty good.

Anybody have a bad used CPU story? Would all Xeons be clock-locked, making a pulled one a good option? Also wondering if the current new Xeons are the last ones they'll ever make for the 2011.

Gigabyte X79-UP4.

eBay not looking shiny for the moment. Just CPU-Z screenshots and stock photos until a better seller shows something.
 
Although I am sure an CPU upgrade will help, I strongly recommend getting a separate SSD for your VM's. I have SSD's in my home and work computers that I strictly use for my VM's and they make a hugh difference.
 
Hmm. Looking at the compatibility list.

E5-2680 8/16 Core 2.7-3.5 Ghz

Price on Ebay: Around $300-400

E5-2680 v2 10/20 Core 2.8-3.6 Ghz

Price on Ebay: Around $600-900

Combine one of these with moving your VMs off to SSD storage and the machine should feel COMPLETELY different under load.
 
Chas said:
Hmm. Looking at the compatibility list.

E5-2680 8/16 Core 2.7-3.5 Ghz

Price on Ebay: Around $300-400

E5-2680 v2 10/20 Core 2.8-3.6 Ghz

Price on Ebay: Around $600-900

Combine one of these with moving your VMs off to SSD storage and the machine should feel COMPLETELY different under load.
Click to expand...
MoG OK. :)

Chas, that is looking better and better. I'll dig into that some more tonight and see where it takes me.
 
I wish there were more benchmarks for these applications.

I oversee a machine:

2 x e5 xeon quad cores (they are slow like 1.8 or 2.0ghz)
64gb of ram
10 windows 7 vms
2 server 08 vms
Raid 10 7200 rpm sas drives

Both of the server 08 machines host databases. It appeared for most tasks that the machine was/is CPU or ram limited.

I transitioned the VMs to 4 separate cheap consumer SSDs and now have a big performance improvement, despite disk I/o not appearing a bottleneck before. Some of this may come from each VM benefitting from its cacheing/virtual memory being much faster on an SSD.

If you currently have a consumer x79 chip you are in a much better spot to test limitations than someone with a xeon. Overclock your current chip to 4.5 or 4.8 then run all your tasks...if you see a speedup then you know you are cpu limited.
 
In a similar boat as the OP. I also have an X79 board with 32GB RAM running an i7-3930K OC'd to 4.2 Ghz. I have a separate ESXi server but I also run two VMs locally, one being my VCenter server.

Truth be told, I do far more gaming on this workstation than any sort of development work. For this reason, I am sort of at a crossroads between X99 or Z170 as a potential next build. It seems that the i7-6700K makes more sense for gaming. That said, the X99 seems like a mature platform and I may see how things shake out for Broadwell-E.
 
OP, I run into the same thing as you, using a good number of VM's at once. I will say that the more cores you get the better, and get them as fast as you can afford. Makes all the difference.
 
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