FX8350 Cluster for massive infrastructure simulation

Hi guys. I’m newbie in the professional IT world. I’ve been working as a desktop support lead for 2 years and I am working on transitioning to a sys admin position. That being said I am focusing on getting my MCSA and CCNA certs. I figured what better way to get intimately familiar with administration of a large environment than setting up my own virtual infrastructure at home.

I have gotten pretty familiar with GNS3 and have a good understanding of IOS. The problem at the moment is my 6700k. It isn’t powerful enough to have more than a couple routers and VM’s going at the same time. I hope I can get some advice or suggestions on how to achieve something like this. So I guess to start off here is the gist of what I am wanting to do here.

  • Handle 100+ Windows Client VM’s & a mixed bag of 10 servers mostly consisting of Ubuntu Server and Windows Server 2016

  • Support GNS3 with 10 Routers and 20 Switches running IOS on a variety of subnets and vlans

  • Support a SecurityOnion ELK stack for IDS IPS NSM

  • Support a multi forest Active Directory with several Domains and do huge deployments with WDS/MDT and synced deployment shares with DFS-R

  • Use Arch Linux on each physical system with six 8350 systems in total

I want to bounce this off anybody who cares to see this post. A couple questions I have off the top of my head would be 1. Am I a masochistic idiot? 2. Is there a better way of going about this? Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

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Do you already have said 6 8350 systems? If you are going to buy them, then I would recommend just going with Ryzen.

I have not purchased them yet but if I do 5 systems with Mobos, processors, 1gb Nics , 16GB DDR3 1600 for each, I come to a total of $1308.05. A ryzen 2990wx basic build is netting me about $2800. I haven’t found anyone trying to do this type of thing online with a single ryzen machine so I have no real benchmark to go off of (neither have I found a multisystem 8350 rack like this other than here https://blog.cr.yp.to/20140602-saber.html ). So to err on the side of cost I think I’d rather take the chance with the 8350 setup unless I can find someone who has a ryzen setup that’s running something similar. But maybe your right.

I would probablly wait for the new Ryzen 3000 cpu’s.
“if” the rumors turn out to be true,
then the Ryzen 3 cpu’s will already be 6 core sku’s for arround $100,- - $150,-
But of course we don’t know if those rumors are true or not.
But might be worth waiting for regardless.

FX8350’s are just old and slow, and power hungry.

Still if you cannot wait that long for the new Ryzen stuff to come out.
Then you could still build a couple of Ryzen R5-1600 systems for relatively cheap.
R5-1600 is a 6 core 12 threads cpu, and is way faster and more efficient then an FX cpu.
And you can probablly buy them for less then $200,- nowdays.

You could run those R5-1600 perfectly fine on a couple reasonable B350 boards,
which dont cost the world either.
Or entry level X470 boards, if you need all the chipset features and two pci-e 3.0 x16 slots.

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I never had an 8350, but I ran my 8320 at 4GHz.
It is not a fast CPU.

The Ryzen 5 1400 is about the same in performance and the Ryzen5 1600X is twice as fast.

Example build, 1600X, 2x8 GB RAM, RX 550 comes in at $640 per machine, would only need two to beat 4 8350-systems.


Edit:

The 2950X would replace about 5 systems worth of 8350’s.

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Yeah or even a 1920X 12 core 24 threads which currently at arround $350,- is a real steal.

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1: probably

2: the only better way to do thisis multisocket motherboards and, really, I don’t think you wanna do that.

It is posts like this where people like me learn stuff, thank you

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You could just buy some B450 boards and some ryzen 5 2600 CPUs for the same money, and you would probably be better off. You would still have multiple machines, just fewer, but much better ones.

IMO
dont forget about disk IOPs when trying to run 100+ VMs concurrently.(install space/updating/etc)

If you dont size it correctly, you’ll be waiting quite a long time for installs/updates/browsing.

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Thank you for all the replies guys. I think you’ve changed my mind about his and I’m going the ryzen route.

Thanks for making that picker list. It looks like this is definitely a better option.