In the documentation, Commvault provide hardware specifications for various capacities of Commvault deduplication media agents, Virtual Server Agents, Indexing servers, etc. These provide a recommended number of CPU cores per size oif server
These core counts, assume that all CPU cores are the same, which was true for previous generations of CPUs. However, with the trend towards greater power efficiency, CPU manufacturers have released new generations of server CPUs with a combination of P- and E- cores and are phasing out the previous model CPUs which only have single types of cores.
How does the transition to these modern, more efficient CPUs affect Commvault’s recommendations for CPU core counts in the building block guide? Has Commvault tested media agent, index server, etc. performance with these latest generation CPUs with a combination of performance and efficiency cores to see if their recommendations still hold?
Commvault media agent hardware CPU core specifications with latest generation CPUs
+1
+5- Vaulter
- 20 replies
Hi Ryan, thanks for raising this matter.
As you can imagine, Commvault remains hardware agnostic given the amount of variance between each vendor in terms of performance and efficiency. We continue to assess and test hardware benchmarks for each scenario each year with the infrastructure available to us. However, rather than catering to only the latest and greatest, these specifications remain the bare minimum required in all other cases.
With this in mind, we are not currently assessing Intel P/E core-based specifications but I will look to have this raised internally in the meantime. By all means, if you find similar or greater performance from modern CPUs, then theoretically this shouldn’t be an issue depending on your environment’s workload.
+1Thanks Jon
I’ve not used hybrid core CPUs in a server environment previously, only in a desktop setting, so seeing how they cope with computationally intensive tasks like deduplication hashing and content indexing is going to be interesting.
I did wonder if the recommendation might be to match the P-core count of the CPU to the current core-count specification, although this could be quite expensive.
Anyway, it’ll be interesting to see what Dev come back with once they’ve tested the performance.
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