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How are the AMD FX CPU for running VM's?

opethdisciple

opethdisciple

opethdisciple

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I'm trying to keep costs down so thought an AMD FX chip might be good for a machine for running VM's?

An 8320 for example.

Add 16Gb of ram I should be OK for running VM's (1 - 2 in parallel) and more enterprise grade software?
 
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I recently sold an 8320e and board (buyer wanted it for a cheap esxi lab), but when I had it I often had several VMs running different Linux distros as well as a copy of Windows. Eventually I switched to Linux KVM for the Linux distros and just left VirtualBox for the Windows install. Only used 8GB of RAM in the setup when I had it, but it was enough unless I was running all of the VMs at once, since I would designate a single core and 2GB of RAM per VM.
 
I used to use an AMD FX 6100 to power one of my VM Hosts, was fine... Didn't use over 10% cpu with about 5 or 6 vms running. Always ran out of memory first.
 
opethdisciple said:
I'm trying to keep costs down so thought an AMD FX chip might be good for a machine for running VM's?

An 8320 for example.

Add 16Gb of ram I should be OK for running VM's (1 - 2 in parallel) and more enterprise grade software?
Click to expand...

Purely anecdotal so this is hardly a scientific comparison, but I use an FX-8350 and run a Debian VM on a Windows host with it pretty much 24/7. So long as the virtualization extensions are enabled (why wouldn't they be?), it does a fine job. I've only given the VM two cores of the eight available and 4GB of RAM but it runs pretty happily. I've run two VMs on occasion on the FX-8350 and again it was fine. It's a surprisingly capable chip. It only really looks worse compared to the Intel ones because of single-threaded performance (and power consumption but we don't care about that outside the datacentre). Give it a nice multi-threaded use case such as running some VMs and it does it admirably.

Obviously it's going to depend on what you expect to actually be doing in your case.
 
At that price range, considering I'm looking for a cpu to run multiple VM's I'm right in thinking an inexpensive FX chip like an 8320 is probably the best to go for?

Also do the FX chips come with a fan?

I'm not doing anything fancy, other than using it for study. Linux and CCNA stuff. It's going to be my work horse.

Running a few VM's, learning how to install configure, nginx, squid etc...

Nothing too taxing. Purely study.

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I plan to install Ubuntu on to it as it's free. Ubuntu plays nicely with FX chips?

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Whats the difference between the 8320 and the 8320e?
 
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opethdisciple said:
At that price range, considering I'm looking for a cpu to run multiple VM's I'm right in thinking an inexpensive FX chip like an 8320 is probably the best to go for?

Also do the FX chips come with a fan?

I'm not doing anything fancy, other than using it for study. Linux and CCNA stuff. It's going to be my work horse.

Running a few VM's, learning how to install configure, nginx, squid etc...

Nothing too taxing. Purely study.

---

I plan to install Ubuntu on to it as it's free. Ubuntu plays nicely with FX chips?

---

Whats the difference between the 8320 and the 8320e?
Click to expand...

If it's for study and not anything heavy, you'll be fine with that. The FX-8350 has a little bit more grunt but the 8320 will still do the job. And they play fine with Ubuntu. You might consider Mint as an alternative to Ubuntu - I find it a little more user-friendly, but it's pretty much of a muchness. How much RAM are you planning to have and what will be the host OS and guest OS?
 
h4rm0ny said:
If it's for study and not anything heavy, you'll be fine with that. The FX-8350 has a little bit more grunt but the 8320 will still do the job. And they play fine with Ubuntu. You might consider Mint as an alternative to Ubuntu - I find it a little more user-friendly, but it's pretty much of a muchness. How much RAM are you planning to have and what will be the host OS and guest OS?
Click to expand...

Host OS was going to be ubuntu. VM's will be all sorts of stuff. Linux variants and some win machines.

16Gb was what I was aiming for.

Also want the machine for study for my CCNA. All relevant software etc I may need for that should work under ubuntu?
 
opethdisciple said:
Host OS was going to be ubuntu. VM's will be all sorts of stuff. Linux variants and some win machines.

16Gb was what I was aiming for.

Also want the machine for study for my CCNA. All relevant software etc I may need for that should work under ubuntu?
Click to expand...

Yes. I use it the other way round, Windows with a GNU/Linux guests, but it's fine either way. And that's plenty of RAM. So long as you're not running a commercial service that's plenty of hardware for learning and study.
 
opethdisciple said:
IOMMU? I was planning on a cheap £50 970 board.

I just need a cheap board that will get the job done.
Click to expand...

IOMMU is needed for Hardware Pass through in ESXI.

I use a FX4100 and Asrock 970 Pro3 ( the Extreme series boards work too) and have ran upto 8 or so VMs without becoming CPU bound, RAM or disk are usually first to cause a bottle neck.
 
This board looks good.

Supports IOMMU?

Also how good/bad is the stock fan with the 8320? Do I need to spend money on a new cooler as the stock fan is ridiculously loud?

This video makes it sound terrible.

 
Do you need hardware pass through? If not then don't worry about IOMMU .

I specifically set out to purchase a board that supported it so I could present a SATA HBA to one of my VMs rather than using virtual disks
 
opethdisciple said:
This board looks good.

Supports IOMMU?

Also how good/bad is the stock fan with the 8320? Do I need to spend money on a new cooler as the stock fan is ridiculously loud?

This video makes it sound terrible.

Click to expand...

It's not going to be as quiet as some of those you can buy independently, but it's not going to be a banshee. You can't tell the volume of something from a video. Not unless it's very professionally set up to test for that. And you know what volume to set the video at. ;)

Edit: Just buy it already - it's fine. You can always get a new fan later if it's a problem.
 
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