Budget 90k+ Which Processor and Motherboard should I choose for running 20 VMs for lab purpose:

techieguy

techieguy

Recruit
Hi,

Which Processor and motherboard should I choose for below requirements:

My Requirements:

I should be able to run at least 20 Virtual machines for Practice purpose.

-3 Netapp Simulators

-2 Microsoft Windows 2016 or 2019 Servers machines

-4 RHEL 8 machines

-2 Solaris 11.4 machines

-2 Windows 10 or Windows 11

- 1 Commvault Server

- VMware EXi

My budget is Rs.2,00,000

What I want in Processor and Montherboard

PCIe 5.0 NVMe Support Support

WiFi 6

Min 128GB RAM Support DDR5.

Thanks
 
You have conflicting requirements. You can't be on a consumer grade platform if you're looking to run all that simultaneously you NEED to be on a enterprise grade hardware like Intel Xeon Platinum CPUs or AMD EPYC.

PCIe 5.0 NVMe Support Support: You won't get this on server platform if I'm not wrong but why do you need it? I don't see a use case where you'd need PCIe 5.0 bandwidth. There aren't any SSDs capable of that in market yet neither GPUs.

Same for DDR5. There's no benefit over DDR4 in your use case. If you're thinking about ECC then that's there in server grade hardware already.
 
Last edited:
I would suggest you to consider Google cloud or aws. Do a trial run and see how much it costs. You will have massive flexibility and you can keep running costs low by keeping them off when not needed.

If you want your own machine, go with epyc chip based server. Desktop processors are not designed for server duties.
 
desiibond said:
I would suggest you to consider Google cloud or aws. Do a trial run and see how much it costs. You will have massive flexibility and you can keep running costs low by keeping them off when not needed.

If you want your own machine, go with epyc chip based server. Desktop processors are not designed for server duties.
Click to expand...
What about below one:

Intel Core i9-12900K 12th Gen Alder Lake Processor BX8071512900K​


  • 16 Cores & 24 Threads
  • 3.2 GHz P-Core Clock Speed
  • 5.2 GHz Maximum Turbo Frequency
  • LGA 1700 Socket
OR

AMD Ryzen 9 5950X Desktop Processor (16 Cores/32 Threads/3.4GHz)​


16 Cores. 0 Compromises.
One processor that can game as well as it creates.


?

Can't these processor handle 20 VMs?
 
techieguy said:
What about below one:

Intel Core i9-12900K 12th Gen Alder Lake Processor BX8071512900K​


  • 16 Cores & 24 Threads
  • 3.2 GHz P-Core Clock Speed
  • 5.2 GHz Maximum Turbo Frequency
  • LGA 1700 Socket
OR

AMD Ryzen 9 5950X Desktop Processor (16 Cores/32 Threads/3.4GHz)​


16 Cores. 0 Compromises.
One processor that can game as well as it creates.


?

Can't these processor handle 20 VMs?
Click to expand...
Yes. Both of them will be able to handle 20 VM. But how well they will handle depends on what the VM will be doing. Are the VMs going to sit there while you experiment with VMs or are they going to be actually be used in a production environment? If they are going to be in production environment then you should increase your budget and go for Xeon/EPYC build.
 
nRiTeCh said:
Better grab 2 separate pcs.
I used to run 8 vms spanned across 2 systems one amd and other intel. Easy to manage and with 2 systems one can experiment even more. on all infra aspects..
Click to expand...
Your idea of two middle range PCs which can handle half of my requirement also sounds good, if we have two machines then we may do lot of migration and HA related testing if needed. Possibilities are more here with 2 PCs
 
techieguy said:
What about below one:

Intel Core i9-12900K 12th Gen Alder Lake Processor BX8071512900K​


  • 16 Cores & 24 Threads
  • 3.2 GHz P-Core Clock Speed
  • 5.2 GHz Maximum Turbo Frequency
  • LGA 1700 Socket
OR

AMD Ryzen 9 5950X Desktop Processor (16 Cores/32 Threads/3.4GHz)​


16 Cores. 0 Compromises.
One processor that can game as well as it creates.


?

Can't these processor handle 20 VMs?
Click to expand...
Quoting on this, not sure of DDR5 support on R9 chip.

If you okay with R9s, in my opinion R9 3xxx and R9 5xxx will suffice your needs. Fellow forum member (@saifbukhari) has R9 3xxx series chip on sale
 
vaibhavyagnik said:
Yes. Both of them will be able to handle 20 VM. But how well they will handle depends on what the VM will be doing. Are the VMs going to sit there while you experiment with VMs or are they going to be actually be used in a production environment? If they are going to be in production environment then you should increase your budget and go for Xeon/EPYC build.
Click to expand...
Out of 20 VMs, 4 to 6 will act as master ,
I want to configure below NetApp lab, last time when I tried it on my 6th i7 Intel processor laptop with 16GB RAM, it just could not handle it
NetApp.JPG


Need to one thing, what is most important for running multiple VMs, its no. of cores or more RAM ?

Thanks
 
If all of the VMs are going to be simultaneously loaded with high duty cycle multi-threaded loads, then NO, the consumer platforms may not be able to handle them, and
depending on the loads, you'd need something like single or even dual socket EPYC/ Xeon to make this work.

If they're just going to be mostly idle, then yeah, a high core count Consumer platform may work. But virtualization of the core and memory resources may be difficult due to less physical cores than VMs.. You'd also need like 128 or so gigs of RAM.

Also, we're yet to understand the absolute need for PCIe5 and DDR5..
Do you have any specific PCIe5 hardware that needs this interface. Is PCIe5 hardware even available outside of direct B2B deals between top HW vendors?
 
Looks like if you are budget constrained to 2 lac then get a 5950x with max supported ram capacity I guess 128gb and adjust the rest of the components like get a b550 instead of x570 mobo.

For so many VMs you should also adjust for 2.5 inch SATA SSDs of large capacity, you need to plan according to the anticipated requirements.
 
techieguy said:
Out of 20 VMs, 4 to 6 will act as master ,
I want to configure below NetApp lab, last time when I tried it on my 6th i7 Intel processor laptop with 16GB RAM, it just could not handle it
View attachment 126067

Need to one thing, what is most important for running multiple VMs, its no. of cores or more RAM ?

Thanks
Click to expand...
Everything is equally important. With only 1 core, even 128GB RAM VM will be slow. 16 cores but only 1GB RAM. VM will be slow. 16 cores, 128GB RAM but all VM running from one spinning hard disk, VM will be slow. It is about trying to balance out the system and ensure that one thing does not bottleneck the other.
 
Do they all have to be on the same machine? If not, you will save money and future headache by designing your system using multiple machines.
 
vishalrao said:
Looks like if you are budget constrained to 2 lac then get a 5950x with max supported ram capacity I guess 128gb and adjust the rest of the components like get a b550 instead of x570 mobo.

For so many VMs you should also adjust for 2.5 inch SATA SSDs of large capacity, you need to plan according to the anticipated requirements.
Click to expand...
+1
Add PCIe NVMe SSD (1TB - 2TB) to store virtual machines, pagefile and some buffer space
 
techieguy said:
What about below one:

Intel Core i9-12900K 12th Gen Alder Lake Processor BX8071512900K​


  • 16 Cores & 24 Threads
  • 3.2 GHz P-Core Clock Speed
  • 5.2 GHz Maximum Turbo Frequency
  • LGA 1700 Socket
OR

AMD Ryzen 9 5950X Desktop Processor (16 Cores/32 Threads/3.4GHz)​


16 Cores. 0 Compromises.
One processor that can game as well as it creates.


?

Can't these processor handle 20 VMs?
Click to expand...
If you just start and stop VMs, you can easily run those VMs on a 5950x. Things change drastically when you start running you applications on the VMs, depends on how heavy those applications are. Even if half of these VMs start running heavy apps, your system will crash or you will see lot of errors and VMs will crash. If you are setting up this lab for your own learning, you start with a 5950x, unless you need PCIe 5 and DDR5 for sure (application dependency).

I run a 4 VM cluster on Ubuntu powered by 5800X (8 core 16 thread) and when I do not run anything in VMs, CPU usage remains under 10% and most of the cores are unused. But then, when I install applications (eg: openshift, kafka cluster, SQL database, backend modules, frontend modules etc), the CPU utilization starts going up but it still remains under 20%. Things will be vastly different if I turn this into a prod server or a SIT/PT/UAT server where multiple users hit the application. The 5800x wont be able to cope up with the load as more users hit the application/modules.

I would not go for two medium power desktops as you will end up paying more in the end. Also, you have to look at latency of home LAN when you combine two PCs for your cluster. Latency between two VMs residing on same PC is far far far less than those residing on different PCs on a home network. You will also need to setup a proper home network with switch to reduce latency and errors.

Go with top of the line CPU like 5950x or 12900 if you cannot invest in EPYC or Xeon. Start building the cluster and you will know whether you will need more power or not. If you still need more power, add another PC and form cluster.

What advantage does a server platform give over desktop platform?

You can seat more than 1 CPU in server motherboards and due to this, if you need more CPU power, you just buy another CPU and seat it in second CPU socket. As you pay more, you get motherboards that can take more CPUs. The ECC memory used in servers does error correction and this is critical in production like environments. All components are designed to last long. I have seen servers run for years and years without being turned off. Their reliability is at a different level. Also, usually, there are more PCIe lanes in servers when compared to desktops.
 
For VMs Cores and ram both matter. Assuming 2 dedicated cores you need 40 cores. Asuming 4gb ram each, you get around 80gb of ram requirement. So best to go for 128gb ram.
You can try to go with 5950x and 64gb ram if your machines will mostly idle.
You will also need nvme storage with dram cache and high iops. Perhaps 2 running on raid.

IF you want to do this with consumer better to split it into 2 PCs. Forget DDR5 and Pcie 5 since they're too new. You will have issues since they are newer tech too.
 
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