StarDestroyer.Net BBS

Should we get a dual/dual Opteron, single quad Xeon, or dual dual Xeon (I may have to reevaluate this to only dual cores, since users do tend to overinflate their needs)?

This server will mostly be running tasks inside Vmware (Server, not ESX) or Xen doing miscellaneous activity (mostly web serving, running license servers for various things, subversion hosting, but sometimes testing CPU/RAM intensive research apps w/ multiple users- the applications do vary, so I have no idea were performance bottlenecks could be).

Is Intel still better than AMD when up to 4 cores ?

Right now looking at an HP DL140 w/ a quad core E5310 Xeon and 4x1GB FBDIMMs, and a 80GB SATA HDD, non-hotswap.


The SATA drives HP provide seem awfully expensive- are they any more reliable than other hard drives, or should we just swap them out w/ bigger, cheaper Seagate ones)? Uptime is nice, but downtime for repairs is acceptable, so I'm thinking non-hotswap, non-RAID (which isn't a backup solution anyway).

This isn't really the best forum for advice on this - you should ask on the VMWare forums or the company.

See if you can swing an academic discount on VMWare ESX or try out Windows Virtual Server 2005 (free, 2007 comes out later this year). The major performance bottleneck will probably be disk I/O, especially for research applications.

HP's HDs may be expensive but you might get much better support by buying their whole kit; don't dick around with servers.

I'd aim for the dual/dual Xeons, especially since the quad Xeons use the same socket so it could be eventually upgradeable to quad/quad Xeon. But a quad Xeon might be cheaper than a dual/dual, and they should be similar in performance...

This is coming from someone with no experience in that type of work, however.

Pu-239 wrote:Uptime is nice, but downtime for repairs is acceptable, so I'm thinking non-hotswap, non-RAID (which isn't a backup solution anyway).

RAID isn't a backup solution but it can help prevent loss of some data, as well as help with uptime.