I’m a mechanical engineer that manages our Autodesk Vault installation. Vault is a data management system that essentially stores every version of our 3D CAD files with a database to maintain versions and relations between files. It’s currently running in a VM with a few xeon silver 4314 cores assigned to it. It’s not running great.
I’m not very familar with server hardware and with the large amount of options and how lousy some OEMs make configuring systems. I don’t know what a reasonable system should be. I have basic specs in mind and would appreciate some input on picking a config to meet those specs. Right now this is for budgetary discussions to see if saving 5 engineers possibly hours a week is worth it (my engineering coworkers and I believe it is).
I personally wouldn’t mind building a threadripper system but considering this is for a business, going prebuilt enterprise hardware would be better.
16 core cpu with high clock speed
128gb ram
2x 4tb hdd or ssd in raid 1
Dell is apparently my workplaces preferred server, but I’d take any brand
We also use windows server with hyper-v for VMs, Vault is windows only
For a relatively low investment you can give EPYC a try, by purchasing used 1st gen EPYC hardware from Aliexpress. For under 1000USD you can get a SuperMicro H11SSL-i mainboard, a 32 core AMD 7551P EPYC CPU, 4x 32Gb ECC LDIMM RAM and a 2U cooler with fan. I know, I have 2 of these
Add a 1TB NVMe drive for the OS and VM’s, storage to taste, install ProxMox as host, then spin up some Win-OS VM’s for your tools as required and you should be able to try out before committing large sums of money into enterprise solutions. Benefit of this route: should something go astray with said enterprise gear, you have the EPYC system as fall-back option.
Looks reasonable to me. Since you are on Micro$oft, ReFS instead of RAID, also consider NVMe-SSDs meant for server loads. Depends on user- and part-count though. 10 guys working on the best way to use 50 screws may be fine on NAS/Server SATA, 100 Guys designing a processing plant may need some serious power.
Are you the “designated department expert” (= in charge of this project) or is it department-diy with your IT yet to be informed about these plans?
Windows has some fun features like DFS, which make high-availability much less painful in a M$-only environment. That way you can have two (or more) servers present the same files which helps availability and throughput (to an extend).
Your use case is **probably bottlenecked by the MS SQL server backend of Vault.
You definitely want fast single threaded CPU; if you’re a dell shop, then a PowerEdge R360 would be the best server because it’s going to have the highest single threaded performance of everything they sell that is rack mounted, even if it maxes out at 8 cores.
I’d expect this server spec’d with a E-2488 and enough RAM (at least as much as your database size, plus ~12GB) to be more than twice as fast as a 32 core EPYC 7551p and slightly less than twice as fast than your existing 4314.
If you can run Vault on bare metal instead of Hyper-v even better.
I’ve gone through your pain with Solidworks PDM which has a surprisingly similar backend.
@Dutch_Master We really don’t have the budget to try something and then buy something bigger and better, with how this place operates it’s a one time deal to get something better.
@MazeFrame I am my departments expert and I worked with our previous IT to get the current server, which they then allocated our VM with minimal resources and put many other VMs on the system also, which wasn’t the original intent. I will be working with our current IT if a new server is green lit. Which is why I’m trying to price out a reasonable server. Sub $5,000 would be a lot easier to justify than something closer to $10,000. I’d love to do something more high availability but we aren’t at that scale.
@twin_savage I won’t argue that MS SQL is a likely bottleneck, but I know that Vault running job processes on the same server is a huge bottleneck on the current hardware. For anyone not familar with Vault job processes, that is just converting CAD drawings to PDFs or other formats automatically. I’d rather not run Vault on bare metal as migrating to new versions is much easier with spinning up a new VM versus uninstalling the current version and then installing the new version and doing the import/verify of the data. Using VMs also allows the old version to exist if something goes wrong.
I played around with configuring that poweredge r360 with an E-2488, probably didn’t spec it out perfectly and I didn’t touch any os options as I don’t know anything about properly licensing windows server. I’m curious if there is similar config possible with Epyc, I know there are some lower core count high clock speed options.
I left the ram and hdd options at the bare min as Dell’s pricing on those seems stupid. It looks like enterprise 3.84gb SSDs are generally around $500 and I found one kit of 128gb udimm ecc ram for $500 also. I’d add 2x 3.84gb ssds mirrored and that 128gb of ram.
Yes MS SQL is multithreaded, though the SQL Express that comes with Vault by default seems to be limited to 4 cores and a db size limit of 10gb. A bit of searching shows going less but faster cores would be better for our application and help reduce SQL licensing costs when we have to upgrade to a paid version when our DB gets too large.
Likely not, Epyc is just too slow single threaded to get the same class of performance; even an AMD EPYC 9174F will be ~25% slower than the Xeon E-2488 while using ~double the power of the Intel. AMD’s Ryzen 7000 would be the comparable offering to the Xeon E-2400 series but very few vendors have Ryzen 7000 rack mounted servers with proper features (I think Supermicro might have a couple SKUs).
100% agree, Dell’s memory and storage prices are robbery.
I took a quick look at Supermicro’s site but at least what I saw was the if you have to ask you can’t afford it, I mean prices upon request listings. Now that I have a slightly better idea what to look for I’ll browse their site a bit more. I doubt it but I’ll have to see if we have any type of discount with Dell.
wiredzone will more transparently show the supermicro server prices; supermicro are usually pretty competitive on price. Keep in mind these are completely barebones servers though which is different than what Dell is selling:
