Server CPU Upgrade

[hellfire90]

Hi all!
The company I work for actually owns an HP Proliant HP Proliant ML350P G8, CPU Xeon E5-2609, 32 GB DDR 3 Unbuffered (64 GB soon), 2x1TB WD Re Raid 1(we'll soon add 4 more disks in raid 5) dual redundant 750W PSU (even though only one of them is connected to the power line).
We've got VMWare ESXi 5.1 since we work on VMs the most of time.
Problem is, performance are already lackluster for us, so we were thinking about upgrading the CPU.
I've found some E5 2670 V1 around 130 dollars.
Give that I'm not much experienced in servers, do you think it's worth it upgrading the CPU or it's an already old server? Is the 2670 v1 worth it or should we look somewhere else (also budget friendly)?
But, most important, the stock HP heatsink (which is passive since there's an air tunneling system wth system fans) of the 2609,which has 80W TDP will be suitable for a 2670 or something like that which have TDPs of around 115W?
Thanks everybody for the help!

 

[alceryes]

Are you sure the bottleneck is at the CPU? How many VM's are you running? Are you giving multiple cores to the busiest server(s)?

Good question about the heatsink. Sometimes manufacturers will use the same thermal dissipation design across multiple TDP's. Other times the heatsink will remain the same but there will be better (or more) fans installed. Sever thermal designs are usually very good though - I say go for it. Make sure you know what your current CPU temp gets up to under load so you have something to compare the new one to. Also note that the E5-2670 has a higher Tcase temp, indicative of it being able to run hotter and still be fine.

Warning - swapping out the CPU on your own will probably void any MB/CPU (and maybe RAM, drives, and everything else) warranty you have on the system.

 

[hellfire90]

Are you sure the bottleneck is at the CPU? How many VM's are you running? Are you giving multiple cores to the busiest server(s)?

Good question about the heatsink. Sometimes manufacturers will use the same thermal dissipation design across multiple TDP's. Other times the heatsink will remain the same but there will be better (or more) fans installed. Sever thermal designs are usually very good though - I say go for it. Make sure you know what your current CPU temp gets up to under load so you have something to compare the new one to. Also note that the E5-2670 has a higher Tcase temp, indicative of it being able to run hotter and still be fine.

Warning - swapping out the CPU on your own will probably void any MB/CPU (and maybe RAM, drives, and everything else) warranty you have on the system.

Hi! Thanks very much for all your informations.
About your questions:
Yes, we are giving multiple virtual cores to the VMs (11 at the moment, various Linux distros, most of them running Liferay, Tomcat etc). I'd like to ask you: there is a link between virtual cores and physical cores? I mean, physical cores on this cpu are only 4 but we've already assigned more virtual cores to the VMs. How does this work?
At the moment, from what I can see on Vsphere Client, we are not at maximum CPU capacity, we are about at 3/4, differently from the RAM, on which we are almost saturating 32 GBs.
The plan is to install more and more VMs on this machine, that leads to upgrading the CPU.
Warranty is not a problem, I'm pretty sure it's already expired.
About the temperature: how should we monitor it? is it possible from the ESXi or Vsphere client interfaces?

 

[alceryes]

Wow! You have 11 vCPU cores assigned on a 4 core CPU?! I can see why it's getting slow.
There is a penalty for over-provisioning your pCPU's. VM's basically have to 'wait' until all the cores it needs to run an operation are available. Even though the CPU Mhz capacity is not maxxed out, I bet that there's a 'whole lotta waitin goin on.' A CPU upgrade would definitely increase performance. Also, make sure the VM's that you have assigned multiple cores to actually 'need' multiple cores to perform adequately.
For monitoring you'll need to have installed the custom HP ESXi image or installed the SIM utilities on the ESX host afterwards. Then you'll need to setup a monitoring program that will receive the SNMP traps from the ESXi host.

 

[hellfire90]

Wow! You have 11 vCPU cores assigned on a 4 core CPU?! I can see why it's getting slow.
There is a penalty for over-provisioning your pCPU's. VM's basically have to 'wait' until all the cores it needs to run an operation are available. Even though the CPU Mhz capacity is not maxxed out, I bet that there's a 'whole lotta waitin goin on.' A CPU upgrade would definitely increase performance. Also, make sure the VM's that you have assigned multiple cores to actually 'need' multiple cores to perform adequately.
For monitoring you'll need to have installed the custom HP ESXi image or installed the SIM utilities on the ESX host afterwards. Then you'll need to setup a monitoring program that will receive the SNMP traps from the ESXi host.

Wow, we really didn't know about this, even though it always seemed strange/bad to me in fact. Actually we are provisioning even more than 11 virtual cores
Thanks or the head up! I've also found where to look and in Vsphere client for the cpu temperature.

 

[alceryes]

YW.
Yes, you can look at temps right in the client. If you also wanted some historical/reporting/monitoring/alerting you should use SNMP traps with a dedicated monitoring system.

 

[uguv]

You really need a new server or set of servers. Even if you increase the amount of CPU and RAM on the host, your storage is going to be a huge bottleneck. Without multiple hosts and decent shared storage you lose most of the benefits of running hardware virtualization.