Im starting my budget for 2012 and i want to look at replacing a couple of my older XEON 5400 servers with a single new server additional server for our existing VMWARE environment. Currently we run a mix of XEON 5400, 5500 and 5600's. However for our next server Im wondering if there is any performance difference between Operton vs Xeon.
I have 2 Servers that run 2x Xeon 5400's (4 cores hyperthreaded ) for a total of 8 logical processors and 32GB RAM each that i want to replace with a single server (to redistribute my vsphere licenses) since Vsphere 5.0 doesn't have core restrictions anymore
Currently i would look at getting a server with maybe 128GB of RAM. I'm trying to figure out if going with the 2x Opteron 6176 (12 Core @ 2.3Ghz) total of 24 cores is any better or the same as going 2x Xeon X5660 (6 Core + Hyperthreaded @ 2.8Ghz) for a total of 24 logical cores.
And yes, I realize the issues regarding vmotion / HA etc for having dissimilar CPU's but as it is my VM's on the X5400's wont Vmotion to the 5500's anyways.
Server load would be SQL DB's, Exchange and various other misc servers + VDI clients.
The VM Cluster backs onto a 10Gbe SAN.
dual Opteron
HP ProLiant DL385 G7
VMware ESX v4.0 Update 1
30.96@22 tiles
dual Xeon
HP ProLiant DL380 G7
VMware ESX v4.0 Update 2
38.97@28 tiles