Question Guidance on choosing a CPU for a relatively modest ESXi host ?

[jamesp81]

I’m retiring and replacing some old hardware at work. One of these systems is an old ESXi server.

Instead of paying the unreasonable prices Dell charges for even a modest server, I’m going to build my own.

This server will run around 6 to 8 VMs but only one has any kind of heavy workload. The others will be inconsequential compared to the one.

The one in question will be running MS SQL Server 2022. It will host the database for an application that has around 100 users total, and probably around 30 to 50, at most, concurrent users at any given time. A typical transaction will involve small updates to simple text and numeric data fields throughout the day. So…a moderate number of small reads and writes. The heaviest workload the database will get into is usually sorting data, as some of our database tables contain some extensive historical data.

I anticipate this VM being provisioned with 8 vCPUs and 32gb of memory.

I am trying to decide which cpu I should use. My requirements are that the cpu simply not bottleneck on me.

My CPU, due to how MS licenses Windows VMs will need to be 16 cores.

I am leaning toward the Ryzen 9 7950X. I am aware this is not technically a server CPU. However I’ve also never once had a problem that would’ve messed me up because I didn’t have ECC memory or a Xeon instead of an i7 or similar. I have had storage failures so I am going enterprise grade on that component. I’ll use an Areca trimode raid card with 4 NVME drives in two RAID 1 arrays. I also tend to think that the higher IOPS numbers provided by NVME will benefit my DB driven application more than a higher end cpu will.

I want a reality check on my thinking though. Does Xeon, Threadripper, or Epyc provide some kind of advantage over Ryzen 9 that would be practically applicable to my actual use case that I am unaware of? I can be convinced to use the higher end CPUs if there’s a practical benefit and I think I could get that budget approved but I want to check with some other experts here if those server CPUs give me anything that’s actually going to matter before I incur the increased costs.

Edit: I forgot to mention, in case it matters. I am going to be migrating away from ESXi to Hyper-V server due to major licensing cost increases for VMware.

 

[jeremyj_83]

I’m retiring and replacing some old hardware at work. One of these systems is an old ESXi server.

Instead of paying the unreasonable prices Dell charges for even a modest server, I’m going to build my own.

This server will run around 6 to 8 VMs but only one has any kind of heavy workload. The others will be inconsequential compared to the one.

The one in question will be running MS SQL Server 2022. It will host the database for an application that has around 100 users total, and probably around 30 to 50, at most, concurrent users at any given time. A typical transaction will involve small updates to simple text and numeric data fields throughout the day. So…a moderate number of small reads and writes. The heaviest workload the database will get into is usually sorting data, as some of our database tables contain some extensive historical data.

I anticipate this VM being provisioned with 8 vCPUs and 32gb of memory.

I am trying to decide which cpu I should use. My requirements are that the cpu simply not bottleneck on me.

My CPU, due to how MS licenses Windows VMs will need to be 16 cores.

I am leaning toward the Ryzen 9 7950X. I am aware this is not technically a server CPU. However I’ve also never once had a problem that would’ve messed me up because I didn’t have ECC memory or a Xeon instead of an i7 or similar. I have had storage failures so I am going enterprise grade on that component. I’ll use an Areca trimode raid card with 4 NVME drives in two RAID 1 arrays. I also tend to think that the higher IOPS numbers provided by NVME will benefit my DB driven application more than a higher end cpu will.

I want a reality check on my thinking though. Does Xeon, Threadripper, or Epyc provide some kind of advantage over Ryzen 9 that would be practically applicable to my actual use case that I am unaware of? I can be convinced to use the higher end CPUs if there’s a practical benefit and I think I could get that budget approved but I want to check with some other experts here if those server CPUs give me anything that’s actually going to matter before I incur the increased costs.

Edit: I forgot to mention, in case it matters. I am going to be migrating away from ESXi to Hyper-V server due to major licensing cost increases for VMware.

The biggest advantage that Xeon, Epyc, etc... have are the extra PCIe lanes and RAM channels. What type of networking are you using for the server? How much RAM do you need? Is this going to be in an HA environment? You could easily look at a SuperMicro server running Epyc 8000 or 9000 series. Also note that Hyper-V is only cheaper if you don't want to use the Hyper-V version of vCenter. IIRC you can still get ESXi Essentials.