6, 7, 8 core processors?

itsmeyouknow

Hi,

I'm involved in a project where it was discussed to use 6, 7 and 8 core processors in a virtual server on a network. I don't fully understand the number of cores that should be required and why on a machine, so was kinda looking a bit dumbfounded. Can anyone help, or put me in the right direction to find out why to use a certain amount of cores on a processor and why?

Cheers,
Ed

Khannie

Well in general you want more cores if you have a problem that is parallelisable, that is that it can be spread across lots of cores. Not every problem fits into this space. Zipping files for example generally wont perform super well on a high core count machine.

On the flip side, you can make things go super fast if you have software that can make use of all the cores. That's really what it boils down to. If the software is good for lots of cores, then more cores is better.

Moonstar

Also worth bearing in mind that if you are just doing something general purpose like web hosting, but with high volumes, having more cores will be beneficial as both the OS itself and the majority of software (eg. apache etc.) will be able to use the extra cores to scale up.

You'd need to first figure out if you really need them though, depending on demand, and also make sure to configure with enough additional memory for the number of cores. Typically this estimation could be done on a test machine, measuring the server load (specifically, CPU usage) with simulated traffic or requests.

itsmeyouknow

Cheers for the responses. Basically, it would be for a Windows server and Citrix server environment with maybe 30 users per server.

Khannie

itsmeyouknow wrote: »

Cheers for the responses. Basically, it would be for a Windows server and Citrix server environment with maybe 30 users per server.

My worst nightmare.

Well in your case, more cores is definitely better. As many as you can get your hands on. I would recommend looking at dual (i.e. 2) 6 or 8 core servers in that case. You'd still be giving each user < 1 CPU each.

There are no CPU's with 7 cores that I am aware of by the way. It's usually 2, 4, 6 or 8.

edit: Just so I'm clear: 30 users on the system at the same time, each one essentially running their own VM? (I'm not overly familiar with citrix specifically, but I'm guessing it's similar to other virtualised environments?)

Squeaky the Squirrel

A million cores...uh arrrr!

itsmeyouknow

Thanks for that. Would be a published resource they would be accessing, not a full VM.