After playing CE 2.0 games on a Threadripper 7960X rig for one of my more affluent chums last week, by the Sunday of that weekend I was wondering what the opposite end of the spectrum would look like.
I came up with some requirements of my own for this rig whose only purpose is to demonstrate Nutanix Prism Central and Playbooks on two single node Clusti.
I also want to mention that CE 2.0 does not recognize i5/i7/i9 E Cores and you HAVE to turn them off on you BIOS before you proceed with the Phoenix installer.
One of my chums bought his own bits after reading my blog and I just waltzed over to see whut his beef was and it was the BIOS settings for the E Cores.
Knowing this, select a CPU with 8 Performance cores which rules out the i5 unless you select the one with 6 performance cores!
For me this rules out the Intel line of CPU entirely as with a 5900X you get 12 performance cores and I have seen a major difference in performance of a Ryzen 5900X compared with ANY intel desktop CPU as no matter what, the Max performance cores is eight (8).
Very Po Boy Node Guidelines
96GB DDR5 RAM for Prism Central Node & 64GB RAM for 2nd Clusti
No PCIe NIC
All 2.5GbE on Motherboard Ethernet
No PCIe GPU
Max $59.99 2.5GbE switch
256GB (H) NVMe boot disk
1TB NVMe (C) Drive
4TB SATA 3 (D) HDD
Ethernet CAT6 cables
i7 8 Performance - minimum Core 12/13/14th Gen CPU
$59.99 Computer case
750e ATX PSU
So I hit B&H, Amazon, Central Computers and the NewEgg web sites for a bit of online shopping.
The motherboard I chose was the ASUS PRIME B760M-A Intel B760 board which has two M2 2280 ports, 4 x SATA 3 ports, 4 x DDR5 RAM slots and an LGA1700 socket that supports 14th, 13th and 12th Generation Intel i5/i7/i9 CPU fare.
I like this board because it has no WiFi and just one RealTek 2.5GbE RJ45 socket.
I selected two Corsair Pro DDR5 48GB 5600 DIMM sticks as two DIMM sockets are the faster RAM configuration you can build and we do not need more than 96GB RAM for the Prism Central node.
For the second Clusti node we went with the stock Corsair 2 x 32GB DDR5 5600 sticks.
The whole shebang with all parts, network cables, components, ATX cases, Switch, KVM box, PSU, CPU, DDR5 RAM Kits etc all came to $2,572.97 all in with taxes.
This was for two Single node clusti each using the 12th Gen 10 core 12600K CPU with integrated UHD graphics.
My pal Johann Hatting wanted the Very Po Boy rig for his restaurant IT Lab and we hooked the switch up to the WiFi router mesh network he uses there.
The install of CE 2.0 went flawlessly on both systems and the Prism Central designated node with 96GB DDR5 RAM was dealing with it's task real swell.
The AOS update took a fair bit of time after we had 4 hours of uptime on each clusti node and we barbecued his new Boerewors concoction which we quaffed with a few lamb chops and slurped some Nambian breweries Windhoek Export frosties to wash it all down.
All VM's were Deepin Linux hosts and the RAM was stable at a 5200 clock on both rigs.
He is very happy with his Very Po Boy system and we went with Cat8 ethernet cables to the cheapie 2.5GbE switch for which we had to find a couple of 1GbE SFP+ units for from Finisar.
I was rather stunned at how solid the 2.5GbE stuff installed and operated.
The ceiling on this rig is about 8 concurrent Deepin Linux VM's, but it runs them all rather well.
The 64GB clusti node actually can run 12 Deepin VM's with ease but I would maybe look at the 14 Core i5 for this function over the 10 Core if I was going to use it myself.
An easy upgrade down the road.
So far this CE stuff is looking rather promising the more I play and install them on different hardware options.
On Johann's rigs I would add a 2TB SATA 3 SSD data disk to work with that 4TB HDD as it is rather slow compared to an all flash Threadripper 7960X rig with 256GB RAM and big fat SATA and NVMe SSD in it.
For those that care...
