AMD FX-8320 Vishera CPUs

$150 for an 8-core 3.5GHZ CPU? Well, TigerDirect recently had the AMD FX-8320 Vishera CPU on sale. I have to say, I'm more excited to get this CPU than my Ivy Bridge INTEL i7-3770K.

In general operations, the INTEL i7 will be faster. Maybe 10-20% faster (on certain benchmarks) but it is also twice the price. Make no mistake, the AMD line of CPUs offer a great value and that is why I like to use them.

In most single threaded benchmarks, even the i5s will be faster than the AMD 8-cores. However, when you start running heavily multi-threaded applications, the AMDs are pretty darn good. Running Linux and multiple VMs, they perform very, very well.

Below is a typical workload of running 6 medium size virtual machines (ranging from 2-4GB of usage). I consume on average 20-26GB of RAM out of my 32GB. I can assign separate cores per VM. 

And in general, the VMs run quite well. AMDs make great Linux Dev builds. With a good AM3+ mobo, 32GB of RAM, you can build a nice box for well under $400.

FoxConn E-350 nt-A3500 running OpenELEC

OK, I got my $110 barebone Foxconn PC and added some leftover RAM I had lying around. Since it came with a free 64GB SSD, all I needed to do was install an OS.

I elected to install OpenELEC (http://openelec.tv).

OpenELEC is a small embedded linux distro running XMBC. 
There is a specific AMD Fusion build so I installed it via USB. You can also boot off the sdcard if you are inclined to install on a leftover sd card lying around.

It works great. I plugged in a USB 3 drive formatted exFAT and played a 1080p blu-ray rip and it worked. I thought there would be stuttering but it handles h.264 just fine. I have not tried MKV but WMV, FLV and 720p AVIs play fine.

I should have ordered another one. It is so small and handy to play with.

Deal: Foxconn Netbox nT-A3500 Barebone

Here is a good deal not to pass up. Small net-top AMD APU E-350 barebone computer.
It is currently $120  ($110 after rebate) with 64GB OCZ Agility SSD at NewEgg.

It is the size of a few DVD cases (19 x 14cm and 2.5cm tall). It supports one 204 laptop dimm and a 2.5" laptop drive. The power draw is 14-23W (idle to playing video).

It comes with a SSD and I have a few laptop memory lying around. At $110,why not?

It is $110 after rebate today: http://goo.gl/DULcp

Slick deals thread on this.

Update: here it is.

ESXI 5.0 Virtualization server with 6-cores and 32GB RAM for under $400

The Fujistsu MX130 small foot print server is getting a lot of love these days.
In fact, I love it so much I decided to get a second one when it went on sale again.

I just upgraded the memory to Mushkin Silverline 32GB for $122 when it went on sale at NewEgg.

Now, I have a great little ESXI 5 Hypervisor server for under $400 with 32GB of RAM.

$140 Fuji Server
$122 32GB of RAM
$120 6-core AMD FX-6100 CPU
$12  extra gigabit card
$394 total

I can run 20-40 Virtual Machines (depending on size and payload). Average LAMP VM are 256-512MB so if I only wanted to host Linux VPS, I think I can probably go as high as 50 LAMP VM.

I'll build my second MX130 whenever deals and bargains arises for components.

Ghetto IT: ESXi 5.0 Virtualization server on a budget AMD laptop

Here is my weekend ghetto ESXi VM server. A $200 budget AMD laptop.

I have to convert a rather large physical server at home so I jury rig an unused laptop.

This laptop has no love whatsoever. It was a $200 special from Staples or Office depot that you find on Black Friday door buster sale. The household is pretty much a tablet household and we don't have much use for it and it has been sitting in the closet for well over a year.

The laptop is a HP DV6 Pavilion with an Athlon Turion P540 processor. I reckon it is a celeron speed based CPU. The thing it has going for it is 8GB RAM (ram is cheap) and an eSata port. Otherwise, it is a rather horrible (1366x768 resolution on a 15.4" screen, awful keyboard, and lousy trackpad).

I figure I can create a makeshift ESXI server to create a makeshift datastore that will eventually be migrated to a "real" server.

To my surprise, the laptop was perfect. I made a bootable ESXI usb stick that previously worked on another workstation and connected a SATA dock. To my surprise, everything works. With an ethernet crossover, I was able to make some backups and testing.

A cheap $5 USB USB stick was my boot OS. ESXi happily boots from flash storage.

(ESATA cables and a cross over ethernet makes this portable.)

I was able to dock an undock drives easily. The drives then showed up on my production server automatically. I managed the whole session with my macbook and a cross-over cable.

In Conclusion, those cheap Walmart/Staple/Best Buy budget AMD laptops can come in handy when you need to improvise. I like the fact AMD doesn't gimp their virtualization features in their CPU. Unlike the cheap Intel Celerons/Atoms/I3s, some of the AMD offerings are quite nice.

FreeNAS Mini-ITX AMD E-350 Lian Li PC-Q25 build

I recently built a FreeNAS  ZFS RAIDZ box for my personal backup archives. I wanted something elegant and low powered with the ability to run ZFS. FreeNAS is a NAS appliance built on FreeBSD. It supports the ability to run the ZFS filesystem and can be booted off a small flash storage like USB or Compact Flash.

I selected the following components:

• 6 X Hitachi 2TB 7200rpm Desktars 3.5 " drives
• ASUS E35M1-I Mini-ITX Motherboard with an AMD dual core E-350 and 8GB of RAM.
• LIAN LI Silver Aluminum PC-Q25A Mini case 
• FreeNAS-8.2.0-RELEASE-p1-x64 (r11950)
• 8GB internal Patriot USB stick as OS boot

A few notes on my setup:
The ASUS E35M1 is a low voltage netbook AMD Fusion CPU (same one found in the Thinkpad X120E) and supports six SATA 3 6Gb/s ports. The LIAN LI PC-Q25 case can hold up to seven 3.5" hard drives. Five of those seven drives can be hot-swappable.

Here are some pictures of my build.The fit-n-finish on the LIAN LI is pretty impressive. The machined aluminium is well made. This case was clearly designed to be a HTPC or NAS box. It fits well in my Apple - Macintosh environment. Except for the logo up front, it is one slick looking piece of gear.

The Asus motherboard has everything I needed. 6 SATA ports for 6 HDD drives! All the data drives are connected to the motherboard while an internal USB stick boots the FreeNAS OS.

It also has a passive cooling heatsink.

This is where the AMD solution shines. I could not find an Intel based Mini-ITX mobo/cpu with 6 SATA III 6Gb/s ports nor one with a passive heatsink. Moreover, none of the Atom boards officially support 8GB of RAM necessary to run ZFS.  This is the perfect small form factor board for FreeNAS!

Internal USB header attaches to the motherboard and hides the USB inside the case.

Picture below depicts drives loaded up. There are five hot-swappable bays. I had to put this to real world practice by taking out drives while the OS was running and without rebooting! The backplane is pretty interesting since it uses molex connectors for power.

With 8GB of ram, I have enough to run ZFS and RAIDZ; giving me roughly 9TB useable space.

After my build, I started to notice some degraded RAIDZ errors on my 3rd disk. Disk #3 seemed fine. I zeroed out the data and booted a different OS (Linux Mint) and copied files with no integrity issues. I tried the drive in different computers and everything checked out fine (S.M.A.R.T) and other scans. However ZFS zpool was giving me checksum errors. Well, it turned out to be a case of "silent data corruption." Linux Mint and Ubuntu did not see any problems but FreeNAS was able to give me a good heads up. It turned out to be a bad SATA cable. Once replaced, everything was fine.

In terms of performance:

Running a short DD benchmark,I was getting 263-268 Megabytes per second on the internal bus. This is pretty decent considering it is a RAIDZ disk array.

 [root@RAIDZ] /# dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/RAIDZ/test.dd bs=2048k count=10000  
 10000+0 records in  
 10000+0 records out  
 20971520000 bytes transferred in 74.518446 secs (281427232 bytes/sec)  
 [root@RAIDZ] /#   

 [root@RAIDZ] /mnt/RAIDZ# dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/RAIDZ/test.dd bs=2048k count=10000  
 10000+0 records in  
 10000+0 records out  
 20971520000 bytes transferred in 76.008326 secs (275910826 bytes/sec)  
 [root@RAIDZ] /mnt/RAIDZ#   
 

In short,

268.3899230957 megabytes

263.1290683746 megabytes


Through the network, I was getting 60-80 MB/s. This may be due to the Realtek 8111E gigabit controller on-board or the fact I was testing during the middle of the day with 60 other people on the network. I was hoping to get closer to Gigabit's theoretical limit of 125 MB/s so I may experiment with a dual NIC Intel card in the future..

Overall, I am very happy with this NAS build. It supports AFP, CIFs, NFS, iSCSI, Rsync and works surprisingly well. I also like the fact I have other FreeNAS boxes that easily sync to this one with just a few click of a mouse. 

The only thing I wish for is a motherboard with 7-8 SATA ports so I can use a SSD as a cache accelerator drive.

The NAS even works surprisingly well serving files to my iPad using AFP, Samba or SFTP.

Fujitsu MX130 S2 microserver

Newegg recently had a sale on the Fujitsu MX130 S2  micro server for $140 so I decided to pick one up.

Now, I have to say this is a great little machine: AMD AM3+ motherboard, up to 16GB (some users have gone to 32GB) of ECC server dimm memory, 6 sata connectors, 4 drive bays in a small package. You can upgrade to various 95W class AMD cpus. It comes standard with a Sempron single core CPU, 250GB 7200 rpm drive, and 2GB of ram. That in itself is enough to run FreeNAS and you'll have yourself a great little file server. The build quality is very good. In short, this is a micro server class machine targeted to small businesses who needs something economical and green friendly.

I decided to take a little further and upgraded to a FX 6100 6 core bulldozer and added 16GB of ram to make it into a portable testing ESXi box so I can do some virtualization testing. I replaced the stock drive with a 32GB sata boot drive, 128GB SSD, and two 2GB Hitachi 7200 rpm drives.
With multiple  cores, a few of drives hooked up, and 16GB of ram, I have myself a little staging lab on my desk. For another $12 and change, I am going to add a secondary gigabit card and an e-sata breakout panel.

I figure I can run 15-20 or so lightweight VM appliances on this thing. Things like a lightweight  MYSQL replication, rsync server for backups, GIT/SVN ,etc.

ESXi 5 and XenServer 6 installed with no problems.

For $140 this is a great little box you can use to play around with. It is not going to win any speed tests but for my needs, it is just perfect. I only wish I got a second one.