Hyper-V CPU choice

Soldato
Joined
26 May 2009
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Can anyone tell me which would be the better of these two CPU setups for visualization using Hyper-V running on Server 2012? Having a bit of an argument here.

CPU choice 1 is a pair of Intel Xeon E5440's (4 cores per CPU, 2.83GHz, 12MB cache, Core2 era architecture). Choice 2 is a single Intel Xeon E3 1230 (4 cores with HT, 3.2GHz with 3.6GHz turbo, 8MB Cache, Sandy Bridge architecture).

In my mind choice 2 is the de facto choice, I don't see how 8 cores from 2008 are going to be match for 4 Sandy cores with HT, it's a half GHz advantage plus the two generation IPC gap. However my mate is convinced that 8 cores beats 4, simple as /shrug.
 
The sandy bridge will be world's ahead in terms of both power usage and cpu power.

Core2 era was fairly similar to Phenom II and even and ivy bridge celeron will beat a phenom II as far as Ipc is concerned.
 
I'd go with the Xeon E3 its going to be newer and faster and support more features.

The Penryn architecture is a good few years old now, its also 3 generations below the E3-1230.
 
Thanks guys, just to derail my own thread you mind if I bring HDD's and RAM in?

The two servers are:

1: HP DL380 G5 - The Intel Xeon E5440's, 4GB DDR2, 8x 2.5" SAS bays with P400 controller.
2: HP ML110 G7 - The Intel Xeon E3 1230, 14GB DDR3, 4x 3.5" SATA bays with on board B110i RAID (I think that's software RAID).

This is to host a couple of virtual servers via Hyper-V, the DL380 would obviously need a RAM upgrade but the ML110 could probably get away with its 14GB due to dynamic memory for virtual machine, or it could be upgraded cheaper than the DDR2 in the DL anyway. For the price of 1-2 decent 300GB SAS drives for the DL the ML could be given four 500GB Velociraptors in RAID 10 which would give great price performance and reliability.

Obviously I want to use the ML but now I have proven it has ~ twice the processing power of the DL my friend is bringing RAID into it and stuff >.> I suppose the P400 from the DL could actually be put in the ML but I still think the ML is the better choice for just a couple of virtual servers, the newer hardware is, well newer.
 
Looking at the PassMark benchmark website it has:

[Dual CPU] Intel Xeon E5440 @ 2.83GHz
CPU Mark: 7455
Single thread performance: 1,185
Intel Ark

Intel Xeon E3-1230 @ 3.20GHz
CPU Mark: 8019
Single thread performance: 1,808
Intel Ark

It looks like the cheaper, newer CPU has surpassed the older more expensive one. The newer one seems to have better support for virtualisation too.

I doubt I'd put the older technology RAID card into it. It seems to be limited to 300MB/sec per channel and 2GB/sec on the host bus. If it's for a test environment, I'd be tempted to splash out on an up-to-date RAID card and hook up some Samsung 840 Pro's.
 
With the ML110 G7 you can buy a couple of off the shelf SSDs for around £300 (you thin-provision the VHDx), which would make the VMs absolutely fly. With the DL380 you'd have to buy HP SAS drives (forget about SSD) at roughly the same price and 1/1000th of the performance (and ironically maybe smaller size). The power consumption and heat output of the DL380 compared to the ML110 is a world apart also -- the DL380 would consume easily £100 more power per year than the ML110 would, probably closer to £200.

CPU-wise, 2 x E5440 added together have roughly the same amount of raw processing power as 1 x E3-1230 -- but the power consumption is vastly better on the E3, and it will have more features.

One big advantage of the DL380 is that it will support more RAM then the ML110 does. And obviously if this is a proper large organisation, then a DL380 is a more serious bit of kit, with lots of built-in redundancy. But from a pure cost perspective, the ML110 is a better bet, especially in the long run when considering power consumption.
 
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