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I replaced my ESXI VM farm (5x dell 2950) with three R720 (dual E5-2660 8 cores, 32gb) and moved the older 5 to my DR building, and setup Site Recovery Manager for replication. All is well there, but our Citrix (metaframe 4) is really old, so I am building 2 more E5 boxes, with local SSDs, hosting 3 citrix xenapp VMs and 1 profile server. Each R720 was $7k+ while these cost me $2500 each, but I lose my redundancy that goes along with dual PSUs and better server class hardware. The point was to build a server strong enough to run it all, then build two of them. The server will be setup with iSCSI and will work just like my other 3, except will have SSD just for the citrix and profile servers.

2x ASUS Z9PE-D16 Dual socket 2011 board
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6813131814

4x Intel Xeon E5-2620 Sandy Bridge-EP 2.0GHz (2.5GHz Turbo Boost) Six-Core
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6819117269

2x 32GB ECC Registered DDR1600
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6820239235

4x Thermaltake Contact 21 CPU Cooler
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6835106185

2x Samsung 830 256gb SSD
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6820147164

4x Intel Ethernet Server Adapter I350-T2 (2 port)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6833106128

2x Rosewill server case
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6811147155.

2x Rail kit
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6816132033

2x Corsair 750w
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6817139030

Mobo standoffs (Need 2 per case due to only 8/10 holes line up for EATX case vs SSI EEB board)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 00Y0BA0119






Now the bad news, one board was DOA, the other one is built and in the rack now, just have lots of wiring and vlan tagging to do. Will post a finished pic when the new board comes in

DO WANT DO WANT DO WANT!!!
So these things are for... "work" right? Those VM's ain't gonna run themselves.
More seriously, tell us how it goes, and how the new CPUs do at virtualization.

chuckula wrote:

DO WANT DO WANT DO WANT!!!
So these things are for... "work" right? Those VM's ain't gonna run themselves.
More seriously, tell us how it goes, and how the new CPUs do at virtualization.

Yes, these are for my job (Systems/Network admin). I can tell you the 3 R720 servers with dual E5-2660, which are the 8 core version, handle the VMs great. Our old 5 server cluster would spike to around 40-50% cpu usage, the new servers have never gone above 10%. I am really interested to see what a virtual on a SSD is like, Crystalmark's disk bench will be ran.

Yep, the new R720's and E5's are nice. Our new VMware cluster is mostly E5-2690's, with a few E5-2643's (the -2643's in their own cluster for licensing purposes -- Oracle is expensive and they charge for each physical core in the entire cluster, no matter what's assigned to each VM. On the plus side, a 3.3GHz base clock!).

The R720's are the easiest servers I've ever worked on, and they're well thought out and full featured. We're very pleased with them.

Hope your new build is a success!

The R720s are very nice. I really like the SD cards running esxi, no hard drives are a huge plus. My R720s are severely choked with an old EMC CX300i, its like running virtuals on usb 2.0 drives even our DR's iSCSI NAS has about 3x the speed, it's getting replaced next.

VM:


VS Desktop:


Some performance is lost, but the VMs are very snappy.

I am ashamed. I immediately began considering that for use in my desktop, plus another for the ESXi machine.

Server are up and running, testing xenapp.

Final product (forgive my iphone pic quality):





And the door does close, was worried about the front handles.


And we have a new ibm "I" mainframe coming in a few weeks, so I cleared out a rack and setup the VNXe3000 SAN, looks lonely

Finally got a much better SAN to power our VM ESXi farm shown above. I'll put up some crystal disk mark results when I get it up and running and VMs migrated in a couple of weeks.

Equallogic PS6100s 24x400GB SSD 9.6TB (about 8TB usable), which is plenty, since our current setup is using 1.5TB.

Drool.