AMD Threadripper 2nd Generation

BA94

Member
Hi Guys,

I’m considering ordering a build with the AMD Threadripper 1950X CPU.

However do you think it would be wise to wait for the 2nd generation Threadripper chips to be released?

Has anyone heard any rumours about potential release dates? Last i heard was that they are expected August/September.

Any help would be greatly apppreciated.

Thanks
 

Oussebon

Multiverse Poster
I've not looked in detail but I think I've heard similar.

In the consumer desktop CPU range the clock speeds are a decent notch higher and this helps close the gap with Intel a bit in things that do prefer stronger single threaded performance, while ofc fleshing out the multicore performance. I don't think anyone's expecting more cores, but a nice slice of extra frequency would be great.

If I didn't have an urgent need for the new system, I'd probably wait.
 

Tony1044

Prolific Poster
Wow...that would make a hell of a CPU in a virtualisation platform. I'm genuinely happy to see AMD back in the game and bringing us CPU's that are capable of going toe-to-toe with Intel again.
 

Oussebon

Multiverse Poster
Tbh at that price point I think there's only one place AMD's toes could be described as being with regards to Intel
 

BA94

Member
I'm just about ready to push purchase on a Threadripper 1950X build, for use with virtulisation. Do you guys reckon its worth holding off for the Gen 2 chips.
 

Oussebon

Multiverse Poster
*cough cough* That's what I posted man ;) except Hexus posted it the day after because they knock off a bit before 5 whereas VC are in a different timezone
 
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Oussebon

Multiverse Poster
Sad panda :( Though not as sad as Intel's about to be. I'm still recovering from having my mind blown by that price tag.

@BA94 it probably depends on your budget and exact needs, and someone like Tony1044 could advise on hardware for virtualisation much better than many of us, but it does seem this CPU is pretty close to being out so it would seem to make sense to wait.
 

Tony1044

Prolific Poster
Sad panda :( Though not as sad as Intel's about to be. I'm still recovering from having my mind blown by that price tag.

@BA94 it probably depends on your budget and exact needs, and someone like Tony1044 could advise on hardware for virtualisation much better than many of us, but it does seem this CPU is pretty close to being out so it would seem to make sense to wait.

Happy to. :)

There's a lot of myths and misunderstanding about physical CPU or physical core to virtual CPU (or vCPU) mapping.

A lot of places say 1.5 or 2 to 1 - i.e. 2 vCPU per core, but the truth is any hypervisor you use will actually allow massive CPU overcommitment and still do effective time slicing - i.e. assign physical resources to virtual ones as needed, and ramp down or even shut off resources when not.

That said if this is a home lab type of environment then I'd use a ballpark figure of 5:1 as a start just to keep everything manageable and happy.

(There is much you can read online about doing it properly...and an x:1 figure rarely is the proper way you'd size, but again...home lab).

RAM becomes a much bigger issues of course - if you allocate 4GB each to 20 virtual machines then you need 80GB + at least 4GB for your OS - bit more if you are using a type-2 hypervisor (one that runs in an OS such as Windows) as opposed to a type-1 or bare metal hypervisor (one that is effectively an OS in its own right).

And to quash another myth - Microsoft Hyper-V is always a type-1 hypervisor...even if you install it as a role inside Windows, it runs as its own native OS effectively.

My home lab is a HP ProLiant server running full-fat Windows Server 2016 with Hyper-V installed and it's currently running 19 VMs with an average of 4GB RAM each plus a few beefier ones such as SQL and System Center. It doesn't miss a beat. The host CPU usage barely goes into double-figures % wise.

Storage - go for SSD for the storage your VM's will be on. Even the cheapest and slowest SATA SSD has massively better IOPs (input/output) than any type of HDD. You will notice a huge difference when you come to have to start up multiple VM's simultaneously. Even starting two together on disk will be very much noticeably slower to boot.

Again, my server has a mix of SATA SSD, a PCIe NVMe SSD, and a bunch of SAS HDD's - Windows 2016 allows storage pools with tiered storage so the OS itself handles what goes on which tier so it's always (in theory) fast access. But...it's made much faster in my case because there are parallel RAID controllers with 2GB of battery-backed RAM cache each. You could always add a RAID controller down the line if you wanted to, but get some advice as some are worse than native SATA because they effectively do things in software in the driver, rather than at a hardware level.

So anyway - my advice would be:

As many cores as possible - something like the above will be a beast of a host CPU

As much SSD as possible for the VM's though bear in mind all modern hypervisors can "thin provision" - e.g. I tell the hypervisor that a virtual machine requires 120GB of virtual disk - then to the virtual OS it looks like a full 120GB but underneath, the hypervisor allocates it on demand as use grows...but you need to monitor your use very carefully to ensure you don't overcommit and run out of space accidentally

At least GB/s networking - anything less really won't cut it

Enough RAM + future use...don't forget the OS

Depending what else you plan to use the machine for, either a type1 or type2 hypervisor (examples of type2 would be VMware workstation which is a superb piece of software), or you could run Hyper-V as a role from within Windows 10 (still type1 as I said above) you may or may not want/need additional hardware such as a gaming GPU for example. It's also worth bearing in mind that if you had for example 64GB of RAM for your VMs and they were shut down to game, your games won't benefit from the extra RAM - the difference between even 8 and 16GB for games is negligible.
 

BA94

Member
Hi Tony,

Thanks for your response, much appreciated:)

I decided yesterday to go ahead and purchase a build with the below spec, would you mind giving me vyour thoughts on it from a virtualisation point of view?


Case
FRACTAL DEFINE XL R2 BLACK QUIET TOWER CASE

Processor (CPU)
AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1950X 16 Core CPU (3.4GHz, 40MB CACHE, sTR4)

Motherboard
ASUS® ROG STRIX X399-E (DDR4, 6Gb/s, CrossFireX/SLI) - RGB Ready!

Memory (RAM)
64GB Corsair VENGEANCE DDR4 3000MHz (4 x 16GB)

Graphics Card
6GB NVIDIA GEFORCE GTX 1060 - DVI, HDMI, 3 x DP - GeForce GTX VR Ready!

1st Hard Disk
1TB WD Blue™ 3D NAND 2.5" SSD, (upto 560MB/sR | 530MB/sW)

1st M.2 SSD Drive
250GB SAMSUNG 970 EVO M.2, PCIe NVMe (up to 3400MB/R, 1500MB/W)

DVD/BLU-RAY Drive
NOT REQUIRED

Power Supply
CORSAIR 850W RMx SERIES™ MODULAR 80 PLUS® GOLD, ULTRA QUIET

Power Cable
1 x 1 Metre UK Power Cable (Kettle Lead)

Processor Cooling
Noctua NH-U14S TR4-SP3 Ultra Quiet Performance CPU Cooler

Thermal Paste
COOLER MASTER MASTERGEL MAKER THERMAL COMPOUND

Extra Case Fans
2x 120mm Black Case Fan (configured to extract from rear/roof)

Sound Card
ONBOARD 6 CHANNEL (5.1) HIGH DEF AUDIO (AS STANDARD)

Wireless/Wired Networking
10/100/1000 GIGABIT LAN PORT (Wi-Fi NOT INCLUDED)

USB Options
MIN. 2 x USB 3.0 & 2 x USB 2.0 PORTS @ BACK PANEL + MIN. 2 FRONT PORTS

Operating System
NO OPERATING SYSTEM REQUIRED

I plan to use this for a home lab using vmware ESXi, i decided not to wait on the gen 2 chips due to budget and they may not be compatible with ESXi straight away.

From my research i know the current threadripper line is compatible.

I will mainly be building VMs for learning purposes in active directory environment, also plan to deploy WDS, citrix and also spin up an SCCM server amongst other things.

I'm confident that the 16-core CPU will be more than enogh.

Many Thanks

BA
 

BA94

Member
Hi Oussebon,

It came to £2,751.00

The graphics card is for running 3 monitors @ 1080p resolution. I realise the GTX 1060 might be overkill as i'm not a pc gamer but there wasnt a GTX 1050 available in the configurator.

Thanks

BA
 

Oussebon

Multiverse Poster
If you're not gaming or doing other things that require GPU performance, then I'd suggest finding an alternative. The GTX 1060 is £300 and that's an absurd 'tax' just to run 3 monitors.

An RX 460 is over £200 cheaper and offers 1 x DVI, 1 x HDMI, 1 x DP, same as the GTX 1050s offered by PCS. The RX 460 does appear to be in the Threadripper configurator.

Or buy the system without a GPU (bottom option) and buy and install your own GTX 1050 if you need an nvidia GPU for particular reasons. But don't pay a £200 premium for the 1060. :)
 

Tony1044

Prolific Poster
Oussebon beat me to it - If you're putting ESXi on then only Tesla and Grid cards support GPU passthrough (and I believe not even Grid on the latest version and even then unless I'm mistaken, only for VDI) so it's massive overkill.

Otherwise to me it looks like a good home lab. I see you'll have 4 free RAM slots as well - always good for future proofing.

One other note: you can boot ESXi from a USB stick so you might not even need the smaller SSD

On a related note if you need any help around the VMs you want to run I am happy to advise. I was Citrix CCEA #54 :)

I've also worked for Microsoft around Exchange and Active Directory.

SCCM (just plain old "system centre" these days but like most folks inalso say SCCM!) integrates the WDS product now as well.
 
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BA94

Member
Hi Guys,

Thanks both for your advice.

On the RAM, i was considering going for 128 GB of RAM but noticed that the max frequency speeed i could get in that configuration is 2133MHz and i was curious as to why you cant get 128 GB of RAM in 3000MHz configuration? Is it just due to how much it would cost for that?

I assume its possible for me to buy more RAM at 3000 MHz and fit myself in the future if i require it?

@Tony1044 Thanks for the offer of future advice, do you have any good online resources for building a citrix environment?

Many Thanks

BA
 

Tony1044

Prolific Poster
Hi Guys,

Thanks both for your advice.

On the RAM, i was considering going for 128 GB of RAM but noticed that the max frequency speeed i could get in that configuration is 2133MHz and i was curious as to why you cant get 128 GB of RAM in 3000MHz configuration? Is it just due to how much it would cost for that?

I assume its possible for me to buy more RAM at 3000 MHz and fit myself in the future if i require it?

@Tony1044 Thanks for the offer of future advice, do you have any good online resources for building a citrix environment?

Many Thanks

BA

Morning.

Carl Stahood - http://www.carlstalhood.com and J.G. Spiers - http://www.jgspiers.com - are both good resources.

Something popped into my mind today and that's that the hardware you've chosen won't be on the vmware HCL so there's no guarantees it'll work properly.

But if that happens Hyper-v should work.

Vmware probably will anyway in all likelihood.
 

BA94

Member
Hi Tony,

Thanks for the links, much appreciated.

I have tested ESXi on my current desktop PC and it is compatible, although the current PC is vastly underspec’d and there’s no room for upgrade, hence the need for the new one:). So i’m Hopeful that ESXi should run on the new PC based on that and what i’ve Read online.

Hyper-V was always going to be my back up plan as i’ve Used that quite a bit in the past.

Thanks Again

BA
 
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