These fairly simple workarounds don't degrade performance.
It also goes well beyond the missing network driver issue Kaby Lake Intel NUCs have, with the workaround explained by Florian Grehl here. This AMD issue goes well beyond the PSODs that Skull Canyon Intel NUCs had, where William Lam guided folks to simply turn of Thunderbolt Controller in the BIOS during install. The question we had was whether VMware ESXi 6.5 would work with AMD Ryzen 7 chips. That means that with an inexpensive case and PSU for around $900 you can have an 8 core 16 thread system with 64GB of RAM making it one of the best value home server systems around.
Especially given the fact that for $329 you get a CPU and heatsink, you can get a $99 motherboard, and add up to 64GB RAM for around $400. The current AMD Ryis a low cost 8 core 16 thread option.
Since we already covered Debian based Ubuntu as well as CentOS and how to fix their crashes with Ryzen and get those systems working, we instead changed our attention to VMware ESXi 6.5.
The virtual machine retains its network identity and connections, ensuring a seamless migration process. VSphere vMotion allows you to move an entire running virtual machine from one physical server to another, without downtime. If you have vCenter or VCSA installed and configured, you have Live Migration of Workloads, moving running VMs between servers easily, even if you only have local storage inside each system: But where's the fun in that? Note that since 2012, with shared-nothing vMotion, you no longer need to have an external shared datastore to enjoy vMotions and migrations. Of course, you could also avoid vMotion entirely, migrating only when VMs are powered-off instead. This way, you can avoid having to dumb the whole vSphere cluster down to the oldest CPU family in the bunch, using EVC if you got it. Ideally, using of similar vintage and capability within each CPU family. So if you're thinking of going with multiple cluster nodes, and you want to move VMs from server to server, it's generally best to go all in with just Intel CPUs or just AMD CPUs. Mixing AMD and Intel in a home lab cluster means no VMware vMotion, at least not while the VM is running. Generally, for virtualization labs left running a mix of VMs 24x7, the more cores with their own cache and communication lanes that still run efficiently at idle, the merrier. Ryzen watt burn compared to Xeon D seems to be no exception, for workloads where you value multithreaded performance (juggling many VMs easily) more than pure GHz (occasional use gaming/single-user workstation).
Historically, AMD CPUs have been a bit more affordable than Intel for a given performance category, at the cost of some efficiency. It's been many years since we've had a splash from AMD, which is part of why there's been considerable excitement about AMD Ryzen™ and The "Zen" Core Architecture built with AMD SenseMI Technology:
Update - In AMD's EPYC CPU, this issue has been fixed in VMware ESXi 6.5 Update 1, more detail below.ĪMD's recent release of an entirely new CPU family that claims to be a true Intel competitor is big news. Posted by Paul Braren on (updated on Jul 31 2017) in