dxun
Explorer
- Joined
- Jan 24, 2016
- Messages
- 52
I am running a 2P SAN for my homelab and am experimenting with mixing two different (but "close") Broadwell-E CPUs on this Supermicro platform, would like to hear some opinions or general suggestions on whether I am actually looking to lose or gain anything with such an asymmetric setup.
Here are the combinations I've tried so far:
This is a somewhat busy, multi-purpose SAN backed by TrueNAS 13-U3. It tries to be many things: it serves as a general purpose filer, a Plex server, a personal cloud host, surveillance storage, and a VM / DB SAN (via iSCSI + zvol). The zvols with OS installation iSCSI extents are deduplicated. To support this, I have carved out four pools that are a mix of 10/14 TB Exos two-way mirrored drives and a handful of Samsung 970 PROs, Intel NVMe and mirrored Optane 900p drives (these are pulling double duty as SLOG and dedup vdev). The iSCSI are targeted by a couple of Proxmox hosts that host a number Kubernetes clustered nodes. RAM is 128 GB. Network traffic is split so that less demanding traffic is shunted over copper NICs whereas iSCSI traffic traverses a pair of 10G fibre links arranged in MPIO.
What I am having trouble is understanding whether this platform benefits more from cores or clocks - right now, this is run by a pair of 12-core E5-2650 v4 and I am quite happy with how it's running (e.g., fio is reporting each VM capable of > 10k IOPS).
That being said, I'd like to use up my stock of CPUs in an optimal fashion so I was thinking of combining higher speed of 4-core E5-2623 v4 with an 8-core E5-2620 v4? In addition to lost cores, I'd be taking a slight hit with RAM speed over the E5-2650 v4 (2400 -> 2133) but since I am not running a lot of jails or any VMs that should care about that drop. NB, all these CPUs are HT-capable.
Any thoughts are appreciated!
Here are the combinations I've tried so far:
| CPU1 | CPU1 cores/turbo clock | CPU2 | CPU2 cores/turbo clock | DRAM speed | Works? |
| E5-2630 v3 | 8/3.2 GHz | E5-2640 v4 | 8/3.4 GHz | 2133 | Yes |
| E5-2650 v4 | 12/2.9 GHz | E5-2650 v4 | 12/2.9 GHz | 2400 | Yes |
| E5-2623 v4 | 4/3.2 GHz | E5-2623 v4 | 4/3.2 GHz | 2133 | Yes |
| E5-2623 v4 | 4/3.2 GHz | E5-2620 v4 | 8/3.0 GHz | 2133 | ? (yes, probably?) |
This is a somewhat busy, multi-purpose SAN backed by TrueNAS 13-U3. It tries to be many things: it serves as a general purpose filer, a Plex server, a personal cloud host, surveillance storage, and a VM / DB SAN (via iSCSI + zvol). The zvols with OS installation iSCSI extents are deduplicated. To support this, I have carved out four pools that are a mix of 10/14 TB Exos two-way mirrored drives and a handful of Samsung 970 PROs, Intel NVMe and mirrored Optane 900p drives (these are pulling double duty as SLOG and dedup vdev). The iSCSI are targeted by a couple of Proxmox hosts that host a number Kubernetes clustered nodes. RAM is 128 GB. Network traffic is split so that less demanding traffic is shunted over copper NICs whereas iSCSI traffic traverses a pair of 10G fibre links arranged in MPIO.
What I am having trouble is understanding whether this platform benefits more from cores or clocks - right now, this is run by a pair of 12-core E5-2650 v4 and I am quite happy with how it's running (e.g., fio is reporting each VM capable of > 10k IOPS).
That being said, I'd like to use up my stock of CPUs in an optimal fashion so I was thinking of combining higher speed of 4-core E5-2623 v4 with an 8-core E5-2620 v4? In addition to lost cores, I'd be taking a slight hit with RAM speed over the E5-2650 v4 (2400 -> 2133) but since I am not running a lot of jails or any VMs that should care about that drop. NB, all these CPUs are HT-capable.
Any thoughts are appreciated!
