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jrkurosawa
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Poor performance after move to AMD Opteron 6174 from Intel Xeon E5450

We have recently migrated our ESX cluster from vSphere ESX 4.0 U1 to ESXi 4.1 and from Intel Xeon E5450 to Opteron 6174. Despite the massive jump in CPU capacity as well as the increase in bus speed etc we have noticed a deterioration in performance in a number of processes which we monitor. The other significant change we introduced was the NX bit being set.

We have upgraded the VMWare tools, VM Version and reset any customised CPUID masks (we had some vmotion problems after a previous upgrade) however performance is still not on par with the old CPUs.

Is there anything we need to do either to the guests or the hosts as part of such a significant change in CPU architecture ?

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JohnADCO
Expert
Expert

We have done pretty many of these.. Well not the same change, but from intel to amd anyways.

Any performance difference for the worst we have encountered so far has come down to issues with the storage networks on the new hosts.

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JohnADCO
Expert
Expert

PS: Super important that VT is set enabled on the AMD hosts. It dod not seem to make near as much difference on our intel hosts.

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jrkurosawa
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Turns out that the Power Saving options actually do something (who knew... ). Three things to change in the default BIOS settings in addition to the AMD-V and NX etc

Under Power Management Options in the Main Menu (for a BL465c G7):

  1. Set the HP Power Profile to 'Maximum Performance'

  2. Set the HP Power Regulator to 'HP Static High Performance Mode'

  3. Under Advanced Power Management Options -> Minimum Processor Idle Power State to 'No C-states'

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t-g
Contributor
Contributor

Hello jrkurosawa,

did you successfully fix the problem with Power Settings?

I'm curious because I'm having similar problem, too.

VMs' network performance is very low on AMD Opteron 6174 server :smileyconfused:

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jrkurosawa
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Our solution was the one listed above - changing the power settings in the BIOS. We've had no performance issues since.

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