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Due to upgrading from Centos 7 to 8 (no in-place upgrade is supported) I need to get a new dedicated server. Naturally, having had the current one a few years, an upgrade would be nice.

The question is, would you consider this an upgrade? On paper the single-processor Ryzen kicks the dual Xeons into a cocked hat - but might I actually lose out in some way? Xeons are 16c/32t total, Ryzen is "only" 12c/24t, but benchmarks seem to suggest will be faster in every other conceivable metric.

I'm far from an accomplished sysadmin though (very much a full stack jack of all trades), and I don't know if I should have strong reservations about moving from trusted dual CPU server architecture, to essentially desktop PC single CPU.

The old server is 3x3TB SAS RAID 5 while the new one would be 2xNVMe SSD RAID 1; I can see that that is a clear improvement. Both servers have 128GB of ram (more than I need, if I'm honest). I'm just interested in hearing opinions on the CPU swap.

My stack is nginx/php/mariaDB.

I'm not close to saturating my current 32 threads, but I'll probably live with this new box for a number of years, and would always prefer to have ample headroom, and just don't want to accidentally make a downgrade.

Thank you!

Please advise, thank you!

Codemonkey
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2 Answers2

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I would never use a consumer desktop CPU in a professional environment, for one they're very memorylimited, they don't have RAS features and aren't designed to maintain the uptime of a server-class CPU, see if you can get hold of an EPYC-based server. Also PLEASE don't use R5, especially with >1TB disks, it's dangerous and essentially negligent - R1/10, R6/60 and ZFS are the only games in town.

Chopper3
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  • I am aware on the R5 front (I wasn't when this box was configured) - it's one of the reasons I'd like to start afresh on a new server. You say "memory limited" - 128GB is more than enough for my needs, or did you mean CPU cache? I CAN get an Epyc 7502p though, for an extra $60 (25%) per month, roughly... – Codemonkey Nov 09 '20 at 21:31
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    Pretty much everyone on Server Fault recommends server CPUs for servers. The RAS features and hardware support are better than consumer models. – John Mahowald Nov 09 '20 at 23:01
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    Actually I stand corrected, I have 3x3TB drives and only 3TB space, so it's raid 1. FWIW in response to my questionI have now ordered a Hetzner AX161 (Epyc 7502P) – Codemonkey Nov 10 '20 at 07:33
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There are a very few server motherboards out there with proper IPMI/BMC, ECC RAM support, etc., that will support Ryzen. But they are few and far between. Except for support for ECC memory, AMD doesn't provide much support for Ryzen in servers (yet). That said, if you're very cost sensitive, you have proper out of band remote access to the machine, and can live with the memory limit, it can work. The big thing that concerns me here is that your NVMe drives are probably not hot swappable. When one fails you'll have some downtime while it is physically replaced. Again, if you can live with that...

That all said, yes, the Ryzen will absolutely destroy your current server in terms of raw performance.

Michael Hampton
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