single i7 vs dual xeon

[kawertz]

I'm building an new system for serving vmware drives across iscsi. will i benefit more from higher speed multicore with hyperthread or multiple processors?

 

[anodos]

I'm building an new system for serving vmware drives across iscsi. will i benefit more from higher speed multicore with hyperthread or multiple processors?

You'll benefit even more from buying a motherboard + CPU that supports ECC memory. This means your question should "which xeon processor should I get, and will I benefit from having two of them?" :p

 

[jgreco]

And the answer to that is that you probably won't find having two CPU's useful at all, at least not if you do things right. The bang-for-buck numbers are greatly tilted in favor of single socket E5, such as the E5-1650 V3 on an X10SRL or X10SRW with 128GB of RAM. Seen ours here blowing around data at 6 gigabits per second and 85% idle.

 

[kawertz]

jgreco. thanks for the info. I think i'm building almost the same hardware.
X10SRL-F
E5-1650 v3
64GB ECC Kingston RAM
3-LSI 9240-8i flashed down
Chelsie 10GBe

 

[jgreco]

The X10SR is the right way to go unless you run out of steam, which doesn't seem likely to me based on what I've observed. I do suggest getting the RDIMM memory at this point; 128GB is less than $1000 at this point (4 x 32GB DIMM).