Questions regarding best practice for hardware

[pjlandry]

Hello All.

I suspect my questions have no answers, but here we go.. 

Presuming the CPU's are of the same frequency and generation, which is better:   Fewer physical Sockets with more physical cores/socket OR more physical sockets with fewer physical cores/socket?  (For example, A "8 Socket server populated with dual core CPUs" or a "2 socket server populated with octo core CPUs"? -- Of course, .

Along the same line, Which would be better performing:   A cluster with 10 hosts with single sockets, or 5 hosts with dual sockets?  (Same CPUs, and with the understanding that no one VM requires more resources than the individual host can provide.  No CPU or RAM contention)

Thoughts?

Thanks.

[weinstein5]

Question 1 - There should not be any difference between the two options

Question 2 - Likewise tehre should no difference in VM performance

I have also moved this to a more appropriate forum

[EGarbuzov]

Besides performance, you can look at another efficiency parameters: servers with more sockets (like 4 or 😎 use more units in DC; more servers in cluster demand more power and cooling.

[VirtuallyMikeB · Accepted solution]

Hello,

I believe vSphere licensing is still per socket, an important point for those that write the checks!  And then there's NUMA.  If you have any idea the size of VMs you'll be running, you can buy hardware that fits your NUMA characteristics.

Regarding your second question, you're asking the age old question of scale up versus scale out.  You'll find as many opinions as people you ask.  The answer, "it depends," is largely true here so you need to enumerate and analyze your requirements and constraints.  A few things to ponder on scale up vs. scale out:

- With more, smaller hosts, fewer VMs will be affected during a host failure

- On the flip side of the first, fewer, larger hosts with many VMs can take more time to recover those VMs during an HA event

- Larger hosts generally cost more than smaller hosts

- Smaller hosts limit the size of your VMs compared to that of larger hosts

There are many more pros and cons to each along with what's already been mentioned in this thread.  Good luck!

Mike

http://VirtuallyMikeBrown.com

https://twitter.com/VirtuallyMikeB

http://LinkedIn.com/in/michaelbbrown

[pjlandry]

Thanks for the input.   You've validated by own thoughts on the matters.  

-P