acess Server 2008 NFS share on Linux

[VJ]

The system is not compatible with Hyper-V. These are the CPUS: http://ark.intel.com/products/27270/...he-533-MHz-FSB
(actually, not exactly, as they have hyperthreading, but I cannot find them on the Intel website)

[UtwigMU]

The system is not compatible with Hyper-V. These are the CPUS: http://ark.intel.com/products/27270/...he-533-MHz-FSB
(actually, not exactly, as they have hyperthreading, but I cannot find them on the Intel website)

If you have really old hardware it's better to use workstation 6 or 6.5 over VMware server 2.0 as it has more options.

[Jammrock]

Wow, those are reeaaaallllyyy old. The cost of getting new CPUs could be offset by the power consumption of those things. I've been looking at these for my next home server, and then move my HP micro to NAS duties.

http://ark.intel.com/products/75463/Intel-Xeon-Processor-E3-1265L-v3-8M-Cache-2_50-GHz

http://ark.intel.com/products/75051/Intel-Xeon-Processor-E3-1220L-v3-4M-Cache-1_10-GHz

[dZeus]

Wow, those are reeaaaallllyyy old. The cost of getting new CPUs could be offset by the power consumption of those things. I've been looking at these for my next home server, and then move my HP micro to NAS duties.

http://ark.intel.com/products/75463/Intel-Xeon-Processor-E3-1265L-v3-8M-Cache-2_50-GHz

http://ark.intel.com/products/75051/...Cache-1_10-GHz

Electricity is not that expensive yet

However, VJ's CPUs might be a bit slow compared to new CPUs under heavy load (all depends on what he's going to run on them). The ones you link to look nice, but don't come very cheap. I have to say that the Xeon E3-1230L v3 looks like a very nice quad core low power xeon (one step up from the 1220L v3).

I wonder how the cheapest AMD CPUs with AMD-Vi compare to the cheapest Intel CPUs with VT-d.

I've also been looking at Supermicro motherboards with an Intel mobile CPU. These look very nice, but also cost a lot of $$$ (and therefore probably not interesting for me), due to expensive mobile parts and low-volume custom designed motherboards.

[Jammrock]

...yet

Older CPUs don't have a lot of the power management that newer ones do. So under idle and light usage the older CPU will still eat quite a bit of power, while the newer Haswell-based Xeon's have excellent idle power and light usage power draw. And he has two of them in the server as I recall.


I know AMD's performance per watt is excellent compared to Intel. Intel is still king when it comes to raw performance, but for standard workloads AMD is competitive. Windows Azure uses AMD Opterons for its cloud services and VMs because of this.

You really don't need VT-d or AMD-Vi unless you have very specific virtualization needs.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86_virtualization#I.2FO_MMU_virtualization_.28AMD-Vi_and_VT-d.29

It's really hard to find the very-low power AMD server CPU's though, so I generally look at the Intel line. Though given the cost of the Xeon E3's I amy just get a low power Core i3 or i5 and use that as a server. Cheaper, lower power, and works just fine for home workloads.

I generally avoid mobile chips for servers because they are usually stripped down compared to the desktop part and they are more expensive.

[VJ]

I know it is an old system, but it is not running 24/7. It is more of a test case, which is also why I'm running most things on virtual machines (possibility to port to another hardware). Current main test case is media server / file server, but it does not need to be switched on when I'm at work, or out.

I really want to get a new computer, after UPS dropped my i7, but having everything running on this dual Xeon allows me to see which things I want to do with it, and what is possible.

Ideally, I'd like to built a new htpc/server pc, and use the Atom that currently was that task as simple work pc (it is powerful enough for that). But at the moment I don't see the need: I need to know better what I would want to use the system for.

[UtwigMU]

If I'd be buying a motherboard for server now I'd get a supermicro with Atom or for Xeon (you can use Low Voltage).

[Jammrock]

The Atom S stuff looks pretty interesting.

http://ark.intel.com/products/series/71265

http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/Atom/X9/X9SBAA-F.cfm

The first gen I think it too underpowered with too many legacy features. No SATA 6Gbps. PCI slot instead of PCIe. Single SoDIMMS slot. CPU is still 32nm with 1MB cache. Usable for some simple tasks, but not for general purpose computing. At this point I'd rather get an E3 part.

[dZeus]

VMware is still the best IMO as in the days of older platforms their products were most advanced and newer platforms (KVM, HyperV) only started at fancier hardware requirements.

I've also been using VMware on older hardware.


Though at this point you could probably buy C2D CPU/Mobo/RAM combo that is faster and consumes less power and supports newer hypervisors for about 50 EUR.

just an update about this scenario (virtualization on old hardware):
I've repurposes my old P4 workstation (Intel Northwood, i.e. 32-bit only) as a VM host.

Options were:
- Xen ParaVirtualization (PV)
- VMWare ESXi 3.5
- VMWare Workstation 7
- Oracle VirtualBox

Xen PV does not work with Windows as guests OS, so it's been ruled out.
VMWare ESXi 3.5 did not work well on my combination of hardware + iSCSI target (LIO). Also requires usage of an old version of VSphere with buggy interface.
VMWare Workstation. Costs $.
In the end I went with VirtualBox, and run it in headless mode, with the integrated RDP server for console access, on a minimalistic Debian 7 install that uses around 30 MB RAM after bootup. Generally, it works pretty well.

One major disadvantage is with VirtualBox (and VMWare Workstation), that the memory of a guest OS is not dynamically allocated or overcommitted. It always allocates the full amount. For example, if I run Windows Server 2008 with 1GB RAM max, it uses the 1GB at all times. Apparently, when running on x64 capable CPUs, there are some memory management tricks called Memory Ballooning and Page Fusion. For obvious reasons I haven't tried those features.

I haven't tried running VMWare Workstation 7 in headless mode on Debian, to compare it with VirtualBox. So far, since Oracle VirtualBox is free, I haven't really seen the need to compare it, as the features are similar.

I'd like to re-try ESXi 3.5 in future, if it can provide memory overcommitment on a x86 host CPU. One main disadvantage of ESXi is that I keep all my guest OS in separate iSCSI target luns, while ESXi seems to prefer to put them in virtual drive images inside a iSCSI target ('store'); the latter makes it impossible to boot a guest OS stored on a iSCSI target with iPXE on bare hardware.

If you have a VT-x capable 64-bit CPU, you can run more capable hypervisors, such as a recent version of ESXi, Hyper-V, Xen HVM or KVM. If you have a non-VT-x capable 64-bit CPU, you can run more recent versions of VMWare Workstation.

[cjolley]

I would have suggested Oracle Linux, but I think it's 64 bit only.