Yesterday I tweeted something and I want to reiterate it to make sure that those who are just following the blog, and not my twitter account, also are aware. On the vSAN Compatibility Guide (VCG) there were already a number of single-socket servers, but most of these were limited in terms of CPU/MEM resources. Last week two new servers were added to the VCG. These servers are based on the AMD EPYC Rome CPUs and can have up to 64 cores. Yes, 64 cores per CPU. They can go up to 2TB worth of memory, depending on the DIMMS used, also while on the topic of memory, the NUMA implementation completely changed with AMD EPYC Rome, but I am sure Frank Denneman will have something to say about that soon. Why would I bring these servers up? Well, for those looking to do 2-node vSAN configurations or smaller vSAN clusters, they could be a great alternative solution! Heck, I would consider them in general I think.
Two new Dell – AMD EPYC Rome based ReadyNode configs were recently added to the vSAN HCL. Single socket, 32 or 64 cores. Pretty sweet! https://t.co/FwppsLfWMQ
— Duncan Epping (@DuncanYB) October 7, 2019
Not just for a 2 node clusters. Also for bigger clusters it makes sense to have more small hosts: in case of failures you lose a smaller amount of compute and storage.
Would love a 16 core model as that means one Windows Datacenter license per host.
I could be wrong, but pretty sure datacenter licensing is core based, and 8core per license under the new model, so you would still have to license for all the cores, no matter what the break down (single vs dual socket.)
That said, ESX is still CPU based isn’t it, so you’d have savings there.