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CPU for home virtualization lab

Xelene

Xelene

Xelene

Soldato
Joined
27 Sep 2005
Posts
4,673
Location
London innit
Thinking of building a mini/micro system to run a bunch of VM (not used for desktop). It will be for messing with small or medium environments aka 10 or so VMs. I'm inclined to get a Has well i7 as it has functional onboard graphics but would the AMD be worthwhile - seems to use a lot of power.

Just planning to use the desktop chip set, not sure I need socket 2011 (or whatever it is). Nothing is performance critical. Thoughts?
 
Hyper-V or ESXi?

Do you need Hardware passthru?

If ESXi and you require hardware passthru then you choice is quite limited with AMD as the motherboard needs to fully support IOMMU and there aren't than many available.

If you don't need hardware passthru then pretty much any CPU/Mobo combo will work, but budget for a dedicated Intel NIC as Esxi can be a pain with a lot of network chipsets.

Personally I'd be looking at an 8 core AMD chip, either a GA-990XA-UD3 or Asrock Socket AM3+ 970 Extreme4, PCIe Intel NIC and a cheap low power pci graphics card as the onbaord graphics with these doesn't work
 
Virtualisation features are basically disabled on intel k-series chips (ie 4770k) and so they are not usable for VMs. However a non-k edition would be fine.

The AMD 8 cores are supposed to be pretty awesome at virtualisation. I'd get one of those or a cheap sandybridge xeon.
 
It's mostly going to be used for running a bunch of headless Linux VM - CentOS / Ubuntu LTS. Most likely using Xen as the Hypervisor depending on how free the others are. (As in Beer). There's nothing performance critical, it's a lab to test things like Chef, Mongo clustering etc. Are the K series CPU really crippled? The AMD looks good but 125W strikes me as expensive to run and noisy?
 
125w is the headline TDP, not the average power use. The difference between a 77w Intel and 125w AMD over the course of a year in electric cost will be buttons. I'd go for an 8320/50 and a board that supports IOMMU, and stack it with as much RAM as you can
 
d_brennen said:
125w is the headline TDP, not the average power use. The difference between a 77w Intel and 125w AMD over the course of a year in electric cost will be buttons. I'd go for an 8320/50 and a board that supports IOMMU, and stack it with as much RAM as you can
Click to expand...

Good call. Not going to over clock this as there's really no need and the chip is a fair bit cheaper. Do these have a basic GPU on board? Enough to drive a screen anyway.
 
No GPU on FX chips, you'll need a board with an igpu, a cheap/old card or donor card to set up (my virtualisation box is headless 99.9% of the time anyway)
 
So after some research am going to hold off a while. The AMD part looked interesting, but it kicks out too much heat and the motherboards are terrible for microatx builds. Lucky to get 4 ram slots, crap network and and good luck with fast SATA.

The i7 K chips are okay, and the only they seem to be missing virtualization wise is the hardware pass thru. The motherboards are at least decent and it won't boil to death in a small case. The low power i7 chips seem a better option, but at this price point I start thinking of the 6 core Xeons. Of course a decent socket 2011 motherboard carries a big premium and is still a bit disappointing.
 
will your vms use that much cpu power? i run 4 or so along with the "physical" install that is used for xbmc duties to the telly, just a lowly q6600 which sees very little cpu usage what you will want is bags of ram
 
The individual VM's won't be that busy, but there could be a lot of them running concurrently - 10-15 at a guess. Will definitely need to stick 32GB in.
 
arfoll said:
If you grab a server board from the likes of Tyan/supermicro instead of typical Asus/MSI/Gigabyte stuff you'll no doubt get a rage128 or a Matrox G200 that will do the gfx just fine :) Or the cheapo of the day from Aspeed! For example I've been looking at this Supermicro X10SSL-F board. [1]

Personally i'm doing similar stuff on a i7-3770 (non K chip) which is also serving as my NAS. You really should avoid the K chips, lack of VT-d is really bad - just have a look at some I/O or NIC benchmarks, and the normal chips (or even the -S variants) are fairly easily sourced.

If you care about power, you really want haswell IMHO, ok the TDP (77/87 vs 125W) is not a big difference but the truth is you won't be running @ 100% hardly ever so what you care about is idle power and sleep states... Sadly working that out is a lot more complex than just max power.

[1] http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/xeon/c220/x10sll-f.cfm
Click to expand...

Interesting shout on server boards. I've settled on this board from Asrock:

http://www.asrock.com/mb/Intel/Z87E-ITX/?cat=Specifications

The Z87 chipset is a bit of a waste for me as i'll be using either an i7-4770s or maybe the i5-4570s (need to check virtualisation options for this) - and thus won't be overclocking.

I'm going to get the PC to pull double duties and be a AC access point / vpn router / media server also so some extra features excited me.

It has a mini PCIE slot (with a crap A/C card in it) - this will get replaced with a an Intel Wifi card.
It has a mSATA slot. So I can stick a 128GB SSD in fairly cheaply there.
It has onboard Intel LAN * 1
And finally it has a free PCIE slot for a half height, second Intel NIC.
It supports vt-d (which is pretty rare)

It can only run 16GB of RAM, but frankly most of my VM's are on 1-2GB anyway so it should be enough.
 
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