Ryzen 3 as a hypervisor machine

[jtz79]

Hi folks,

considering upgrading my current proxmox setup from a old i7-3770 to something with more cores. AMD seems to be coming into this market with some quite outrageous specs (like the ryzen 7 2700 E with 45W TDP and 8 cores).

Does anyone here use proxmox on such a platform? (ryzen 7 / x470 or x570)? HOw does it fare in such environment?
I run multiple VM's, mostly linux but windows server / desktop too. Jellyfin, Zoneminder, PiHole, unifi controller, etc etc..

cheers!

 

[DragonQ]

I don't use Proxmox but I do have several Linux and Windows KVM/Qemu VMs (Pihole, Lancache, WSUS) on a server with an R7 1700 and that works great. Good luck finding an R7 2700 E though, I think they're OEM only. You don't need one though: you can just enable "eco mode" in the BIOS to effectively cap the TDP of 65 W CPUs like the R7 2700 or R7 3700X to 45 W. Note that it only really makes sense to do this if you're thermally limited or doing a lot of intensive workloads; idle or near-idle power consumption should be the same with any Ryzen CPU from a single generation.

 

[jtz79]

Ha, didn't know that, as my sig confirms, I've been faithful to intel for a long time... but AMD's offering is becoming hard to ignore.

 

[DragonQ]

Same, I had half a dozen Intel based systems since my first rig in 2009 until I built the server I mentioned. AMD just had nothing to offer back then.

 

[Tetras]

I don't use Proxmox but I do have several Linux and Windows KVM/Qemu VMs (Pihole, Lancache, WSUS) on a server with an R7 1700 and that works great. Good luck finding an R7 2700 E though, I think they're OEM only. You don't need one though: you can just enable "eco mode" in the BIOS to effectively cap the TDP of 65 W CPUs like the R7 2700 or R7 3700X to 45 W. Note that it only really makes sense to do this if you're thermally limited or doing a lot of intensive workloads; idle or near-idle power consumption should be the same with any Ryzen CPU from a single generation.

I don't know about the Ryzen E models, but with the Intel T models, they can actually be less efficient too, partly cos they spend less time idle, but it depends on where the sweet spot is clocks/volts to performance. The 2700 is already super efficient with multi-threading performance (was optimised this way), less so with single-thread.

 

[jtz79]

Interesting feedback all. Looks like I'm gonna have to give AMD a try for the next vm host build!

 

[Avalon]

Please stop comparing power using TDP, it's a poor comparison value as both companies have a different way of calculating it, and even then unless you plan on running everything at 100% 24/7 it's still not great as things like intel power gating mean that idle cores use almost no power. If you have a power envelope you need to operate in, work to it, but also consider that hypervisor environments can be less efficient than bare metal installs, my Ubuntu bare metal uses less power than the same Ubuntu install under ESXI. That said if for example you do a lot of video transcoding, something like an intel iGPU is potentially way more efficient than an AMD doing the same work in software, so workload is also important.

 

[BongoHunter]

I use a Ryzen server at home - can't fault it really, would cost a lot more to have the same perf and features on an Intel build.

Few things that might be useful to know though:

If you get an AMD chip with integrated GPU:

- They don't support ECC if this is important to you

- They also expose less PCIE lanes to the motherboard, so for example if you pair a 3400g with a B450 motherboard, while the main PCIE slot which would be x16 electrically with a regular Ryzen - would only be x8 with one of the APU's

A server requires a bit more planning if you want to leave PCIE slots free for storage controllers or NICs etc. This can make x470 a better choice as they all allow splitting the main x16 slot to two x8 slots (ideal for SAS/SATA controllers or fast NICs) - and the extra lanes they present can be useful as a lot of B450 boards with dual M2 slots will disable SATA ports or PCIE slots if both M2 slots are in use with NVME devices.

On my own system to save space I've also opted to use PCIEx1 graphics card (Zotac make a GT610 in this format), this leaves me with a x16 slot for other uses.

There are a couple of really interesting Asrock rack X470 boards specifically for servers that have remote management & integrated graphics to free up PCIE slots E.G X470D4U / X470D4U2-2T

 

[jtz79]

thanks on the asrock tips, didn't really think of them, integrated gpu helps

 

[Vince]

I use threadripper for my VM's at home and Epyc in the office. No issues to report these days they just work.

 

[jtz79]

quite some time has passed, still running on intel but on a Gigabyte server board on C246 (C246M-WU4, I think), great board.