xeon Dual Xeon E5-2623 v4 or Single Xeon E5-2643 for WTS

[Alkahna]

Hi,

 

I posted this earlier but in the wrong section (too dumb do see this one here)

Im currently speccing out a server (about to serve its duty as a WTS) and I got stuck on CPU choice with 2 Options:

 

1. Go with Dual E5-2623 v4 (4C 8T @ 2.6 Ghz) each has 16GB RAM in Dual Channel
2. Go with Single E5-2643 v4 (6C 12T @ 3.4 Ghz) with 16 GB RAM in Dual Channel

 

It will serve 3-4 Users in the beginning.

 

The point at which I am stuck is upgradability.

 

+ for Option 1 -> better performance from the start

- for Option 1 -> Upgrading means swapping both CPU's

+ for Option 2 -> Buy a E5-2643 v4 when needed and double performance, sweet  (RAM will be doubled as well)

- for Option 2 -> lower performance at the beginning

 

Can anyone say something about performance when it comes to a duel between 2x 4 Cores vs. 1x 6 Cores on those chips?

 

The performance recommendation for its purposes is exactly met by Option 1 and rated for 8-10 users. Since I only have 3-4 users I thought I could drop down a bit to a single 6 Core and have a much better upgrade path down the road. Am I on track or am I missing something important??

 

I took a look at the following benchmarks and was surprised that the 6-Core beats the two 4-Core's but that doenst quite reflect the workload on a Windows Terminal Server.

• Dual E5-2623 v4 Benchmark
• Single E5-2623 v4 Benchmark

 

 

greetings

Alkahna

[brwainer]

I think you have your "option 1" and "option 2" backwards

[Alkahna]

1 minute ago, brwainer said:

I think you have your "option 1" and "option 2" backwards

you are right, fixed that. thanks  

[leadeater]

Because this is going to be used as an RDS server go with the Single E5-2643 v4, the higher clocked CPU will give a more responsive user experience. As you noted you can upgrade later if the demand becomes high enough, 3-4 users won't require that much CPU anyway.

 

39 minutes ago, Alkahna said:

The performance recommendation for its purposes is exactly met by Option 1 and rated for 8-10 users. Since I only have 3-4 users I thought I could drop down a bit to a single 6 Core and have a much better upgrade path down the road. Am I on track or am I missing something important??

What's the application that will be run on the RDS server? Those sort of specs will run far more than 8-10 users, but it depends on the application more than anything else.

 

Edit:

Most of our RDS servers are virtual and have 2 vCPUs assigned to them, RAM is typically the biggest factor for user count per server. We do have roughly 53 RDS servers though but that's for application isolation and security reasons.

[Alkahna]

8 hours ago, leadeater said:

What's the application that will be run on the RDS server? Those sort of specs will run far more than 8-10 users, but it depends on the application more than anything else.

Its a software for a tax consultant office and its quite demanding in terms of hardware. Thats why they list the dual config along with 16 GB of RAM for 8-10 users

8 hours ago, leadeater said:

Edit:

Most of our RDS servers are virtual and have 2 vCPUs assigned to them, RAM is typically the biggest factor for user count per server. We do have roughly 53 RDS servers though but that's for application isolation and security reasons.

In this case there is no need for virtualisation as this will be the only task of that machine (serve the "tax software" and office to 3-4 people)

[leadeater]

40 minutes ago, Alkahna said:

Its a software for a tax consultant office and its quite demanding in terms of hardware. Thats why they list the dual config along with 16 GB of RAM for 8-10 users

In this case there is no need for virtualisation as this will be the only task of that machine (serve the "tax software" and office to 3-4 people)

I usually find vendors way over state the hardware requirements of their applications, not a big deal for you though since it won't really effect what you need to buy anyway. If you have first hand experience as to how much resources the application requires that's much more useful than any spec sheet.

 

For anything directly user experienced based or database server I always recommend going for higher clocks over a few extra cores, you really can notice it. Our case is a bit different because were virtualize everything, bit of a necessity really when you have ~1400 servers/VMs, we use E5-2690v4's on all our ESXi hosts.

 

You can quite easily support 200+ concurrent users with 20-30 cores even on a demanding application like Technology One or SITS:Vision, we do this using 10-11 RDS servers and 2-3 vCPUs + 12GB ram per VM. You'll hit your 16GB ram limit before running out of CPU resource would be my guess.

[Alkahna]

On 14.11.2017 at 9:27 AM, leadeater said:

I usually find vendors way over state the hardware requirements of their applications, not a big deal for you though since it won't really effect what you need to buy anyway. If you have first hand experience as to how much resources the application requires that's much more useful than any spec sheet.

It is the case, thats true. Reason being is that those specs are what they call "futureproof", meaning that those specs are safe to run that software for at least 4 years no problem.

What you said about clockspeed sounds right and is inline whith what I thought.

 

I now settled on 1x Xeon Gold 6128 (essentially the 2643v4 but on the new architecture) which basicly has the same specs but a lower TDP since it wasn't much cheaper than the previous gen E5.

 

Thanks to you for helping me out