Our current ESXi hosts are 5 years old and will be replaced in the next few months. We plan on purchasing new rack mounts servers from either HPE or Dell
- Two new servers for server virtualization - we run about 40 VMs with 35 of them running Windows Server 2012 R2 and the rest Linux. Mix of VMs with heavier use like SQL2014 and many lighter load VMs
- Three new servers for VDI - we have about 160 Win7 desktops spun up, each with one vCPU. With the new servers we will be jumping to Win10, 2vCPUs per desktop, and also have nVidia Tesla M10 cards installed to give some GPU horsepower to each desktop.
The newest servers come with two Intel's Skylake processors installed. These processors have 4 different ranges, Platinum, Gold, Silver, and Bronze, we are focusing on the Gold range and have narrowed it down to 4 choices
| Processor | Cores | Speed (GHz) | Suggested Retail Price | Total cores for server virtualization | Total cores for desktop virtualization |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 6132 | 14 | 2.6 | $2,111 | 56 | 84 |
| 6140 | 18 | 2.3 | $2,445 | 72 | 108 |
| 6142 | 16 | 2.6 | $2,946 | 64 | 96 |
| 6148 | 20 | 2.4 | $3,072 | 80 | 120 |
These servers will have plenty of RAM, 10Gbe connections, and are backed by a Nimble All Flash Array
Any suggestion on which CPU to choose?