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ealtug · November 2012

Hi all, I am pursuing currently MCITP EA and CCNP. What do you think about below spec for these certs? I want to be able to rum some vms without hassle along with GNS3

Zalman Z9 Mid Tower Enclosure Case

OCZ Technology ZS Series 550W 80+ Bronze Power Supply

AMD FX6-6300 Black Edition Vishera Six Core AM3+ 3.5GHz 14MB 95W

Asus M5A97 R2.0 AM3+ AMD 970 DDR3 ATX

Seagate Barracuda SATA 6 7200RPM 16MB 3.5

Corsair 8GB (2 x 4GB) XMS3 DDR3 1600MHz DIMM 240-pin CL9

LiteOn DVD-RW 22x SATA Internal Black - Drive Only

joehalford01 · November 2012

I would go with an i5 if you can afford it, AMD is not holding up well in reviews, although I can't speak for that specific processor. Otherwise, that should do ok. If you want better performance, I would go up to 16GB for the ram and have the virtual machines running on a separate drive either SSD or regular sata.

Roguetadhg · November 2012

You'll need to buy physical switches with GNS3.

Stay away from AMD for a while. I don't consider them in the CPU market with their horrific performance currently

As far as GNS3, you won't need a lot of grunt

mayhem87 · November 2012

I'm not sure what roguetadhg is saying but AMD is fine for a lab and cheaper. I use a 8120 as my esxi/do everything else lab and works excellent. I also used to run it off a i5 2400s and no issues either. Yes Intel is faster but you would be better off saving some money and adding extra ram and ssd. Honestly you could also cut down to a 450w psu as thats what I run mine off of.

Also I do not know where you live but if you have a Microcenter close to you they have awesome deals for amd cpu+mobo

jahsoul · November 2012

AMD only "fails" in the enthusiast market. Unless you are looking at gaming, you setup is perfect. I actually have all Intel in my house (Xeon 3450 in my desktop and L5530 in my VSphere whitebox) but I'm in the process of planning a new all in one whitebox build and I am going to build this around a 12 core Interlagos CPU. It's not like I'm going to play CoD on any VM. lol

MentholMoose · November 2012

CPU performance is typically irrelevant for labbing. Given a fixed budget, spending more on RAM and especially storage (SSDs) should make a more noticeable difference. RAM and SSDs have plummeted in price ($100 for desktop-grade 32 GB DDR3 RAM, and sub $0.50/GB for SSDs) so you can built a nice labbing machine for very cheap nowadays.

Unless you have a specific use case that requires high per-core CPU performance (gaming, video encoding, 3D rendering, etc.), I suggest focusing on core count and power utilization (if you pay your own bills). The proposed specs sounds okay except for the RAM and maybe the disk. I'd say get at least 16 GB RAM, if not 32 GB since it is so cheap. For the disk I would recommend an SSD unless you really need a lot of space for some reason.

My latest lab server has a Supermicro H8SCM-F motherboard ($200), 32 GB ECC RAM ($200), and a hex-core Opteron 4171 ($40 on ebay). With an 80 plus PSU, it uses about 30 watts without disks (60 watts with 2x SSDs, 2x 500 GB SATA disks, and LSI RAID card). So far I've only had the chance to run 20 VMs, which it handles easily. I plan to run 30 VMs eventually and I doubt there will be a problem except for the storage space, so I may add more SSDs when necessary.

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