Ivy Bridge Xeon to AMD 'Rome' migration.

[RafflesTheThief]

Hi all,

 

I'll be as brief as I can be.

 

The firm I work for is coming up for a refresh of their now fairly old Ivy Bridge based hardware (which has been hit by the security mitigations, naturally).

 

AMD released Zen 2 'Rome' based server CPUs yesterday, and the performance/price & relative reduction in power draw (per core, effectively) they are offering vs. current Intel Xeon 'Cascade Lake' is pretty mind-boggling, to say the least.

We are not a large firm, hence minimizing running costs, server rack space, and the like is a fairly significant priority. 

 

Whilst I am very familiar with desktop PCs and up to HEDT stuff (having been building for approx. 5 years now), enterprise and datacentre is not my thing.

 

Come the refresh, would there be any major and/or significant barriers to switching to AMD based servers?

 

Can someone tell me if I am entirely ignorant in thinking that such a migration might be possible? I understand that there might well be some extra hoops to jump through, but I am thinking it might well be worth it, depending on what said hoops are.

[Electronics Wizardy]

what are you running on these servers?

 

Core licensing may be a pain, so does your software care about that?

 

Are you running vms? If so, you normally have to reboot them to move to a different cpu manafacture, but depends on hypervisor and setup. Normally reinstall isn't needed.

 

If your not running vms, good time to move stuff to vms, they make migration and everthing easier.

 

Do you programs need any special cpu features? There are some intel only cpu instructions, and if you need those amd won't work here. This probably won't be an issue as most everything that ivy bridge has rome has aswell.

 

 

[RafflesTheThief]

12 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

what are you running on these servers?

 

Core licensing may be a pain, so does your software care about that?

 

Are you running vms? If so, you normally have to reboot them to move to a different cpu manafacture, but depends on hypervisor and setup. Normally reinstall isn't needed.

 

If your not running vms, good time to move stuff to vms, they make migration and everthing easier.

 

Do you programs need any special cpu features? There are some intel only cpu instructions, and if you need those amd won't work here. This probably won't be an issue as most everything that ivy bridge has rome has aswell.

 

 

Hi, thanks for the reply.

 

In terms of OS, Windows Server and very limited CentOS boxes. In terms of software, really nothing massively 'out there' that I can think of that will cause core licence problems... the only thing that might be an issue is our use of VMWare for our virtual machines?

 

The business isn't especially sensitive to downtime past a certain hour. If it's a major overhaul then the work is done @ the weekend with minimal to no impact on services. 

 

No specific instruction sets needed as far as I am aware. 

[Bishop Crane]

Both OS's should be totally fine, I would be aware of if there are any caveat's of running newer operating systems as they often change the underlying software slightly.
If you're moving from Server 2013 for example up to 16 or 19 then some .net apps will have different requirements.
Microsoft apps will be fine (exchange, SQL, etc) but others may need some extra steps.
CentOS 6 to 7 is a similar thing, some of the packages will be different versions and such.

For VMWare, just install ESXi on the new host, add it to your vSphere cluster.
Shut down the server on the old host, move (or if you want to be extra safe, clone) it to the new host and start it.  It should start perfectly fine, although it may take some extra time to boot with new hardware.

[RafflesTheThief]

52 minutes ago, Bishop Crane said:

Both OS's should be totally fine, I would be aware of if there are any caveat's of running newer operating systems as they often change the underlying software slightly.
If you're moving from Server 2013 for example up to 16 or 19 then some .net apps will have different requirements.
Microsoft apps will be fine (exchange, SQL, etc) but others may need some extra steps.
CentOS 6 to 7 is a similar thing, some of the packages will be different versions and such.

For VMWare, just install ESXi on the new host, add it to your vSphere cluster.
Shut down the server on the old host, move (or if you want to be extra safe, clone) it to the new host and start it.  It should start perfectly fine, although it may take some extra time to boot with new hardware.

Hi, thanks for your reply as well. 

 

It's in our to-do list to upgrade to Server 19 at some point post-migration, I believe. The CentOS boxes are getting phased out anyway so any issues regarding them aren't going to be treated as a priority at all. 

 

Pretty much all we run is Exchange and SQL, to be fair. There is some 3rd party software here and there (mostly trading/accounting based), but as far as I am aware it has no specific platform and/or instruction set reqs. 

 

Good to hear re. VM Ware, though. That was, for me, a major potential sticking point!

[Jarsky]

Assume you're going to be working with a Vendor like HP or Dell?

VMware support AMD Epyc as of ESX 6.5 U2, im sure the big vendors will ensure they support any Firmware/BIOS updates required for VMware on Epyc. 

 

Also keep in mind with consolidation your software licensing terms. 

Some software licenses have specific requirements and auditing that they be run on different physical servers, especially with HA clusters. Especially from vendors such as Oracle

[leadeater]

2 hours ago, RafflesTheThief said:

 

Pretty much all we run is Exchange and SQL, to be fair. There is some 3rd party software here and there (mostly trading/accounting based), but as far as I am aware it has no specific platform and/or instruction set reqs. 

MSSQL has multiple different licensing methods, you need to check this as it'll have a large impact on your cost. If you are using per core licensing of the hardware you'll need to balance that against which SKU you intend to buy as to how many cores it has, licensing isn't cheap for MSSQL. The other consideration is that Microsft currently recommends only using Intel CPUs for MSSQL as the DB Engine is highly optimized for their architecture, you need to have very high database demands to actually worry about that too much though.

 

Honestly licensing could be a big factor to you, it is for most people so you need to get that information first before doing anything.