what would you do with this machine?

[turing]

So I currently have access to a bunch of "extra" machines. These machines have 4 AMD Interlagos 16 core Opteron 6276 CPUs with 512g ram per machine.

My first question is:
I've heard of people running d3 through vmware. Does vmware completely emulate the GPU so there's no GPU usage on the host machine? In that case, I have plenty of CPU resources to blow and could probably run a ton of vm's?

Second question is:
If I ran d3 just plain, I could likely create a bunch of ramdisks that only hold d3 folder (about 8gigs each) so that read/write to disk would not even be a factor. My next bottleneck would be GPU. As you can imagine, this is on a server board which has only 1 PCIE slot (there are other revs of this board that have 4 pcie slots, but I only have 1 of those). As it happens, I happen to have the exact same number of Radeon 5850's as servers.

How many d3's would a 5850 be able to handle?

Last question is:
I'm not very used to windows. I have seen windows server 2008 r2 sp1 load one of these machines and "see" all 64 cores + 512g of ram. The last windows I'm familiar with is xp (32bit), which, would probably be a waste of memory seeing as how it'll only see like 3.25g of it. Anyone know offhand if windows 7 supports this many cores/memory?

Thanks in advance. It'd be interesting to see if I could get ~32 d3's to run on the machine with 256g of ram (8g*32) dedicated to ramdisks for 32 copies of diablo.

 

[l2bot-4ever1]

ur telling me that u ran across a few servers?

 

[cacilhas]

you should be fine as long as you have a decent gpu, a 5850 should handle alot of clients at minimum settings, would be very interested to know how good those cpu's scale in a virtualized environment, im thinking about investing in a 6200 opteron server myself. From my testing vmware seems to be the best right now to allocate gpu power to vgpu's on the vm, you can always try hyper-v with remotefx too.

 

[l2bot-4ever1]

how many bots do you guys plan to run....

 

[The-Lord]

My first question is:
I've heard of people running d3 through vmware. Does vmware completely emulate the GPU so there's no GPU usage on the host machine? In that case, I have plenty of CPU resources to blow and could probably run a ton of vm's?

It emulates a GPU but end of the day it shares resources from the physical machine. If your physical machine does not have a good GPU and cannot run D3 then your virtual machine wont be able to run as well.

Also, I think Windows 7 ultimate should be able to see all the cores.

 

[turing]

First, thanks for the feedback.

ur telling me that u ran across a few servers?

No, I happen to have quite a few of them sitting around taking up space because of work. Specifically working with HPC.

you should be fine as long as you have a decent gpu, a 5850 should handle alot of clients at minimum settings, would be very interested to know how good those cpu's scale in a virtualized environment, im thinking about investing in a 6200 opteron server myself. From my testing vmware seems to be the best right now to allocate gpu power to vgpu's on the vm, you can always try hyper-v with remotefx too.

It emulates a GPU but end of the day it shares resources from the physical machine. If your physical machine does not have a good GPU and cannot run D3 then your virtual machine wont be able to run as well.

I've since found a decent read on vmware's GPU capabilities here: http://www.usenix.org/event/wiov08/tech/full_papers/dowty/dowty.pdf

I'm thinking if I end up using vmware, it'd be for 1 of 2 reasons:
1. emulating x number of mac addresses as it'd be too suspicious for that many d3's to be running on same hardware
2. using vmware might actually help performance as gpu is my biggest bottleneck and some of the vgpu's work will be offloaded onto cpu's which I will have plenty of