Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : VPS Hosting : Virtuozzo + cPanel + Dual Opteron = Good/Bad?

[JHServers]

Considering using/offering VPS's in the future, and will most likely go with the virtuozzo+cpanel route. I may want to use Dual Opteron 240's or 242's to offer these as they are pretty powerful processors. I'm wondering if anyone has some experience with this type of config and how it works. If it's not worth it, I will just use dual xeon's but would like to consider dual opterons. Thank you for any advice/suggestions.

[dkitchen]

I'm playing Virtuozzo on a dual 242 here on my desk with CentOS as I write this, seems to work pretty well.

Haven't used cPanel with Virtuozzo yet so that will be interesting to see. I'm just waiting for a license for that before I install ...

Dan

[JHServers]

Originally posted by RazorBlue - Dan
I'm playing Virtuozzo on a dual 242 here on my desk with CentOS as I write this, seems to work pretty well.

Haven't used cPanel with Virtuozzo yet so that will be interesting to see. I'm just waiting for a license for that before I install ...

Dan

Have you tried comparing performance/reliability to dual xeons? Preferably a dual xeon 2.4 or 2.8?

[dkitchen]

I haven't got one to play with ;-)

But I'm pretty certain the Opteron will beat any Xeon head to head.

Dan

[JTY]

I would imagine that the both Opteron and Xeon will be equally stable. Assuming of course both are built with proper server components.

The Opteron should be a little faster than Xeon. You'll do fine either way, I don't think you'd see a whole lot of difference between the two. Really the biggest areas you'll see gains is by having fast disks, and lots of RAM.

Go for 4GB+ of RAM, and RAID5 using SCSI drives.

[mainarea]

Normal benchmarks will probably tell you whether a Xeon or Opteron will be better... I don't think Virtuozzo would really favor either type of processor over the other.

- Matt

[Yaroslav]

In the Dedicated section a link to a benchmark was posted - according to it, dual Opterons 250 beat dual Xeons 3.4 about 70% in Apache performance. If it is true, Opterons seem to be by far better choice...

[JHServers]

Originally posted by Yaroslav
In the Dedicated section a link to a benchmark was posted - according to it, dual Opterons 250 beat dual Xeons 3.4 about 70% in Apache performance. If it is true, Opterons seem to be by far better choice...

I wouldn't use Opteron 250's until the price came down substantially. 240's or 242's would be the only AMD processors i'd consider for the moment. (Or 140/142's if single CPU).

[Captian_Spike]

I have a few dual 242's and they are the absolute best in the server enviroment. Never tested with virtuozzo, but I would assume the results would be just as impressive.

[Yaroslav]

Yeah JHosts, I agree that 250 are not yet feasible to buy - just wanted to point out that they CAN beat Xeons by far. I think this can be projected to 242 vs Xeon 3.0 to some extent, as the 3.0 doesn't have those architecture enhancements they talk about in that benchmarking article.

[Brannix]

Virtuozzo does a very good job in resource management.

I have tested Dual Xeon 3.0, 6GB RAM, 2 x 146GB HDD. I comfortably run 250 VPSes on it.

[Yaroslav]

I wonder what would be the result for a similar hi-end dual-Opteron... And what would be the bottleneck - CPU speed or amount of RAM?

[Brannix]

I wouldnt know what would that results in, but i suppose definately better.

a simple application allocates a number of small blocks in memory and changes a few bytes.

Memory operations test
Memory allocation and filling
blocks=10000, blocksize=4096
Linux 0.17 secs
Virtuozzo 0.16 secs

blocks=1000000, blocksize=40
Linux 0.38 secs
Virtuozzo 0.36 secs


Networking CPU load test
network traffic generated with ping -f-s 1024 from neighboring host
~2% cpu load

Virtuozzo simply has the high efficiency of available resources usage low performance overhead

[kalpin]

I am currently using:

processor : 0
vendor_id : AuthenticAMD
cpu family : 15
model : 5
model name : AMD Opteron(tm) Processor 246
stepping : 10
cpu MHz : 1993.163
cache size : 1024 KB
fdiv_bug : no
hlt_bug : no
f00f_bug : no
coma_bug : no
fpu : yes
fpu_exception : yes
cpuid level : 1
wp : yes
flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush mmx fxsr sse sse2 syscall mmxext lm 3dnowext 3dnow
bogomips : 3971.48

processor : 1
vendor_id : AuthenticAMD
cpu family : 15
model : 5
model name : AMD Opteron(tm) Processor 246
stepping : 10
cpu MHz : 1993.163
cache size : 1024 KB
fdiv_bug : no
hlt_bug : no
f00f_bug : no
coma_bug : no
fpu : yes
fpu_exception : yes
cpuid level : 1
wp : yes
flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush mmx fxsr sse sse2 syscall mmxext lm 3dnowext 3dnow
bogomips : 3984.58


That's a VPS :-) using AMD Opteron 2 GHz and very good. Also we are running Cpanel in this server.