Building new system for QA testing environment which CPU to use

[tbaror]

Hello ,

We are in process of building new Vmware Vspher  platform which will based on Esxi 5.1.

I need to order the servers and i need help for choosing enough powerful CPU's for vspher host to hold around total 64 guest  each  and the  guest running mostly win2k8r2 with java based agent with our R&D software and some few SQL guests.

My first thought would be between

• Intel® Xeon Phi™ Coprocessor 3120P (6GB, 1.100 GHz, 57 core)
• Intel® Xeon® Processor E5-4640 (20M Cache, 2.40 GHz, 8.00 GT/s Intel® QPI)

With given scenario , will be most appreciate ,what would give me best performance/price wise

Please advice

Thanks

[BreakBIT]

Ciao! I don't tink you 'll need too much power for your hosts, 64 vms you can handle easily with couple of dual socket E5-26xxV2 cpu server (it depends on your application, Memory or CPU intensive?)

I never heard that Xeon Phi is supported by ESXi hypervisor, I'm waiting for this announce... Xeon Phi should be a great improvement for High density clusters!!!!!...

vmware, pls support Xeon Phi cooprocessor in your hypervisor!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Linjo]

Xeon Phi is not supported and do not work vSphere. Its use case is very specific and can be compared to a GPU that are very good in floating-point calculations and should not be confused with a "normal" x86 compatible processor.

[DuncanArmstrong]

Xeon Phi coprocessors are better described as SMP machines on a card. It literally runs Linux and you interface with it in whatever ways you need to, from there. (you can SSH into it locally).

I can't speak for VMware's roadmaps around this, but I can say it's not supported for vCPU use right now, and it's very different from adding more processors to a multiprocessor motherboard. It would be very cool if such hardware existed, but consider basic system architecture first, and then relationship between the existing socketed CPUs, RAM, and now the PCI-E Phi coprocessor card itself. Very cool stuff, but a very different tool than your typical processor.

More info here: https://software.intel.com/sites/default/files/article/330164/an-overview-of-programming-for-intel-x...