I have a Dell PE 2970 quoted and ready to order with the following specs:
- 2X 6-core AMD 2.2ghz 6mb HT-3
- 6X 73gb 15K SCSI 6Gbps 2.5in (RAID 10)
- 16GB (4X4gb) 800mhz RAM
- 2X Intel Pro 1000PT Single Port 1gb NICs
How will the above server perform compared to traditional bare metal server I am running currently? Current server is a 5 year old PE 1425, 2X 160GB SATA, 2X Intel 2.8ghz single-core, 2GB RAM.
Primary load is LAMP web server traffic, not much, max 50GBs per month.
I assume the PE 2970 running ESXi will handle the "load" with absolute ease, but I'm planning on adding development environment VMs for Java/Grails & Ruby on Rails (both CentOS 5.5) and Windows 2003 Server, which will all be routed via one of the NICs (primary NIC will be dedicated to CentOS 5.5 LAMP VM).
Note sure where the bottleneck will be performance-wise in the PE 2970, but trying to account for issues now before I take the plunge. I'm buying a Cisco ASA 5505 for the firewall as well.
Suggestions appreciated!
Best Answer
The processors give you about 6 times the CPU grunt of the older Intel, RAM has (I think) about 2-3 times the bandwidth of the older Intel, Hard disk subsystem is about 9x the IOPS 6x the throughput of the older system. No real surprise there, I'm sure you'd figured that out having selected the components.
In typical environments I'd be looking to consolidate 6-8 "average" servers similar to the baremetal one you describe onto one of these when virtualizing. The 2970 is a pretty good mid range server and the 6 Core AMD Instanbul Opteron CPUs are quite good at virtualization as they support NPT/RVI.
However I'd call out a few things to consider.