HP Blades, AMD or Intel for virtualisation hosts?

Lanz

Lanz

Lanz

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Last year we bought some X5550 based BL460c G6's, and I liked them a lot. This year, the powers that be have decided to buy AMD G7's - There's conflicting reports which are best, last time I looked Nehalem held the virtualisation crown, but what about now with these 2 socket, 8 core opteron things?

Hmm, I Dunno, I've always used intel on the server side, these will be the first AMD servers we have bought.... We are currently using Hyper-V.

Thoughts?
 
Anandtech has some figures for the 12 core Opterons.

And then there is the most important segment: the virtualization market. We estimate that the new Opteron 6174 is about 20% slower than the Xeon 5670 in virtualized servers with very high VM counts. The difference is a lot smaller in the opposite scenario: a virtualized server with a few very heavy VMs. Here the choice is less clear. At this point, we believe both server CPUs consume about the same power, so that does not help either to make up our minds. It will depend on how the OEMs price their servers. The Opteron 6100 series offers up to 24 DIMMs slots, the Xeon is “limited” to 18. In many cases this allows the server buyer to achieve higher amount of memory with lower costs. You can go for 96 GB of memory with affordable 4 GB DIMMs, while the Intel server is limited to 72 GB there. That is a small bonus for the AMD server.
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Nothing wrong with the AMD blades. We've got BL685c G5's running as ESX hosts for our Dev/QAS SAP virtuals, and BL685c G6's running as ESX hosts for our Prod SAP virtuals, and they perform extremely well.
 
I imagine the reason we have moved is because we have bought 30 new ones, and I bet cost of simular intel based blades would have only got us about 20.
 
i have BL680s running our entire environment.

there G5 running dual quads.

each have 32gb of ram and CPU is the least of our worries we never hit any form of cpu threshold. Even some of our BIG SQL servers run on a host with 8 other VMs only problem is running out of memory.
 
Have they been purchased yet? Ignoring the argument as to which is best - there is the issue that you won't be able to vMotion between Intel and AMD hosts. You could try using that to stick with Intel and get some X5600s.
 
We're running some G5 BL680s with 4 6 core processors and about 50gig in each.

Seem to do the job nicely.
 
Last edited:
bluebox said:
Have they been purchased yet? Ignoring the argument as to which is best - there is the issue that you won't be able to vMotion between Intel and AMD hosts. You could try using that to stick with Intel and get some X5600s.
Click to expand...

Not using VMware, we are Hyper-V right now, so does this effect live migration or standard cloning/moving around?
 
The BL465c G7 hits a very nice price point and is really ideally suited as a virtual host. That would be my pick of the crop price vs performance.
 
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