Epyc vs Xeon - the RAM question

Quartz · 4 Oct 2019 at 14:06

I was just looking at Tyan and Supermicro motherboards and noticed that if RAM is the issue, then Xeon is the clear winner: Epyc motherboards seem to be limited to 4 TB of RAM whereas Xeon motherboards go up to 16 TB.

So there you have it; now the question is, why would you want 4 TB RAM, let alone 16 TB?

Sabitech · 4 Oct 2019 at 14:43

what are you looking to build?

WJA96 · 4 Oct 2019 at 16:49

I’ve got a server on a customer site with 2 TB ECC Registered RAM in it. I’d never seen so many sticks of RAM in one motherboard. It runs all the VMs for all their users on site. They claim that with the various hardware and licensing savings, plus the security benefits, it saved them a fortune.

Sabitech · 7 Oct 2019 at 09:21

One reason you may want a lot of RAM is for SQL servers in VMWare / Hyper-V. They tend to use as much as you can give them.

Quartz · 7 Oct 2019 at 09:49

Sabitech said:
what are you looking to build?

I'm not; the question just interests me.

Sabitech said:
One reason you may want a lot of RAM is for SQL servers in VMWare / Hyper-V. They tend to use as much as you can give them.

But 16 TB?

WJA96 said:
They claim that with the various hardware and licensing savings, plus the security benefits, it saved them a fortune.

Interesting. But do you really mean VMs? Or Terminal Services? Because I'm not seeing how the former would really save in licensing costs.

WJA96 · 7 Oct 2019 at 17:27

Quartz said:
I'm not; the question just interests me.

But 16 TB?

Interesting. But do you really mean VMs? Or Terminal Services? Because I'm not seeing how the former would really save in licensing costs.

No idea. It was a LOT of RAM. I suspect TS rather than true Virtual Machines.

Quartz · 7 Oct 2019 at 17:34

WJA96 said:
No idea. It was a LOT of RAM. I suspect TS rather than true Virtual Machines.

When the first x64 Windows Server came out everyone jumped on it for TS. But 2 TB is 32 GB for each of 64 users. Wow.

Vince · 7 Oct 2019 at 17:39

Quartz said:
I'm not; the question just interests me.

But 16 TB?

Interesting. But do you really mean VMs? Or Terminal Services? Because I'm not seeing how the former would really save in licensing costs.

VMWare Horizon might answer that question.

I can see how pushing everything to a single server (or better still a cluster) and running thin clients could save a fortune.

WJA96 · 7 Oct 2019 at 17:56

Quartz said:
When the first x64 Windows Server came out everyone jumped on it for TS. But 2 TB is 32 GB for each of 64 users. Wow.

could they have been running multiple instances of Windows Server in VMs and then running TS on the VMs? They had more than 64 users. A lot more.

Sabitech · 8 Oct 2019 at 09:41

At our office we have 5.53tb of RAM in our virtual environment and are using 2.38tb
We have several data arrays but a lot of this capacity is taken up by Developer VMs and SQL. We do have 2 TS boxes but those are only using 32gb each.
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