Well the Neo's _ARE_ beefier than an Atom from a horsepower perspective, as well as supporting VT extensions...
I certainly agree on the SSD's however. I can tell a pretty dramatic difference with unit I have. -sc From: Ken Schaefer [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Thursday, April 05, 2012 12:07 AM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: RE: recommendations on home server Yeah, it's an AMD dual-core Neo, but since no one seems to know what that is, I've given up trying to explain it :-) Atom seems to have more recognition. FWIW, my team has another one of these sitting in the office (again because it's quiet/cool). It's running SharePoint 2010 with about 6-7GB of documents, which we access using SharePoint Workspace and Outlook. For BAU, I don't think the CPU gets much above 5% I did a quick check on my server at home, and Perfmon.exe was using more CPU than anything else :-) I ran a few admin tools, copied some files, checked the spam filters etc. Exchange is receiving around 50,000 messages/day (>99% spam :-)), yet the VM is using about 3% of the host's CPU. Given that we used to run these things on 500Mhz or lower specced servers, I think CPUs running at 1.3Ghz (or more) these days, should provide sufficient grunt for server Ops. IMHO disk is the biggest bottleneck. Put a couple of SSDs into your server and see what happens. I think you'll be pleasantly surprised :-) Cheers Ken From: Steven M. Caesare [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Thursday, 5 April 2012 11:33 AM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: RE: recommendations on home server Cool.. glad it's working for you. I've had an atom-based machine. And when compared to another box that had practically the same disk specs, I could definitely feel the difference just for simple workstation tasks. Perhaps it could be mitigated some with fast disk, additional RAM, etc... but I'm not sure I'd be comfortable recommending atom based devices as VM platforms. Both my VM hosts are ProLiant dual CPU P4 HT-enabled Xeon's running at 2.8Ghz. Not the latest, but no slouches either. I'd have to say that if I'm bouncing back and forth between a DC, my IIS box, and say Exchange, I can see some CPU hit. I just swapped one of these boxes in to replace an older Dual-CPU P-III box with the exact same amount of RAM, and identical disk. The only real difference is CPU horsepower, and I can tell a difference. But as YMMV has held true for you, it's another option for folks to consider. Especially if heat/noise are larger factors than raw performance. -sc PS- As other folks have pointed out, Atom's aren't actually supported... are you running them anyway, or when you say "effectively has a dual-core Atom CPU" does that actually mean something else? From: Ken Schaefer [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Wednesday, April 04, 2012 10:30 PM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: RE: recommendations on home server Doing admin work takes up very little CPU... How much CPU is required to create a new user or issue a new cert or print a document? Loading Exchange Management Console, or doing a WSUS server cleanup seems to be limited by disk I/O. Using SSDs speeds this up significantly. Even installing Exchange 2010 was less than 2 minutes. On my second Proliant I have SCVMM and SCOM - even those just run along without consuming much CPU. Disk I/O is usually the bottleneck. Cheers Ken ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~ --- To manage subscriptions click here: http://lyris.sunbelt-software.com/read/my_forums/ or send an email to [email protected] with the body: unsubscribe ntsysadmin ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~ --- To manage subscriptions click here: http://lyris.sunbelt-software.com/read/my_forums/ or send an email to [email protected] with the body: unsubscribe ntsysadmin
