As Steve mentioned you cannot vMotion between Intel & AMD. Short of that it has been a topic of discussion on several threads. Based on most people's results you will find AMD has far better performance then Intel's options. Also there was a paper published recently that definatively shows AMD blows Intel out of the water.

Far better - not! better today - yes!


Blows out of the water - Not! Today has an advantage - yes!

Standardization is a good thing! If I was ready to make a leap to AMD I would buy 2 and replace my current 6850 as well, and begin to standardize on the new boxes and configurations throughout my infrastructure. Will this fly at your company?

Most fortune 1000 Companies would not touch an AMD Chip. This all goes to layers 8,9 and 10 of the OSI Model.

There are indeed a number of threads on this forum lately on this topic.

8 = Politics
9 = Religion
10 = Finance

Good Luck

The AMD Opteron processors are gaining a lot of popularity, especially for the HP shops. Right now I think HP has by far the largest implementation of the AMD processors in the server product line. If you look on HP's server website, the Intel based server offerings are really starting to thin out. IBM and Dell, different story.

Like you said, this is today. Tomorrow is tomorrow.

Jas

Have you looked at the roadmap for the future for both? AMD is going to continue to lead for the short term, and if both companies follow their 3 year roadmap then I believe we will continue to see AMD keep and possibly expand their edge over Intel. Intel has shown with their hasty releases of DC that they are not prepared to compete so it will take them time to get up to speed.


Yes, compared to Intel there is no comparison in my opinion.

As long as there are conversations we will always have those. There is no such thing as a bias-free survey/study/etc...

No worries mate, I also respect your opinion. We are all on the same side here, which is to get the best solutions for each other.

How many idle windows guests can you run on DL585 with dual core CPUs (or a dual CPU AMD box) and keep the average total ESX server under 20% when all the guests are idle?

Just trying to compare to Intel CPUs, but most of the estimates I see expect 4-5 VM's per physical CPU with AMD, and I know I get well over that on some machines, but sometimes not...

As a comparison point with Intel, virtual center reports 20% total utilization on one ESX host with 22 mostly idle guests, that are running on a pair of 3.6Ghz single core hyperthreaded Xeons. (Each guest is idles at about 1-2% utilization most of the time).

I know, this is not "typical" servers, but at least for me, in some ways it's a more interesting benchmark, as what can be a better apples to apples load comparison than an idle guest...