Announcing the BuyVM hardware refresh to AMD Ryzen!

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Sorry everyone! Seems I missed a couple communities to spam this onto.

New Year, New… Intel exploit? Sigh.

Since the launch of our KVM Slices, we have used Intel 1270v3 CPUs with SATA SSD storage. This setup has treated us well with performance that does not break the bank. Unfortunately, Intel CPUs have lost their performance advantage over the last 2 years due to design flaws that have led to security exploits/vulnerabilities.

You would have most likely heard of these exploits/vulnerabilities by the names ‘Meltdown’, ‘Spectre’, and ‘MDS’.

While these exploits/vulnerabilities can be mitigated in software, this comes at the cost of performance. Estimates show a performance loss of around 30% when these mitigations are enabled (and even more if HT/SMT is disabled).

Today we are happy to announce a complete overhaul of all of our KVM Slice nodes to AMD Ryzen 3900X CPUs. Our originally advertised 3.5GHz clocks will increase to 3.8GHz with a boost clock of 4GHz+ (we are seeing an average boost clock of 4.1GHz on most cores). Storage will also be upgraded from SATA SSDs to NVME SSDs, which will increase IO performance by 4x or more.

Network connectivity will be upgraded from 1Gbit to 10Gbit. While your service will remain capped at 1Gbit in each direction, we are considering uncapping inbound speeds for long term customers (customers who have had an active service for >6 months for example). We haven’t given this too much thought yet but many users have shown interest in veteran perks.

Last but not least, A+B power will be set up in Las Vegas to protect us from the Homer Simpsons that always seem to end up working on our power panels. This has been in the works for a while but has only recently become possible.

We have begun ordering equipment for Las Vegas and expect to be racking the new nodes in the next week or so. You will receive an email soon that will document when your VPS will be migrated. A reboot will be required upon which your Slice will automagically be migrated to our new nodes.

We expect to get New York done by early April and will be taking this opportunity to bring our Block Storage Slabs online with new network connectivity (ideally, NYIIX & Hurricane Electric). A new Juniper router will also be installed.

Luxembourg upgrades are for the moment up in the air, but we hope to complete them this year as well.

We thank you for your patronage and are excited to see what you think of our new nodes!

Enjoy some hardware porn:

469×626 39 KB

3024×4032 3.14 MB

3456×4608 2.7 MB

Francisco

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This picture would be nothing without the inclusion of those sandals.

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Ryzen SANDALS with ZEN.

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BuyVM has Ryzen :sunrise:

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Nice!
i have a question:
will be a price increase for new Slices with AMD CPU?

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Fran won’t let us down.

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Newp.

Everything stays the same, it’s just a free upgrade at our expense :stuck_out_tongue:

Francisco

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@Francisco

Will we see Ryzen by the end of March? Or do you have another ETA? Just asking because I’m quite eager to try your Ryzen slabs :stuck_out_tongue:

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I have all of the missing heatsinks arriving for next Monday. I have a handful of heatsinks that I’ll be doing some initial building with.

I fully intend to have Vegas fully Ryzen’d before the end of the month. Once the gears online Anthony can do migrations quickly.

Francisco

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Whats the plan for all the old hardware, fact your migration across I guess the old hardware will all be disconnected and not still offered?

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We’ll sell the nodes off.

Probably $250/ea without drives.

Francisco

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What are the specs of each node? I’m interested in that

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1270v3, 32GB RAM, 1U chassis, no drives.

Francisco

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I know you might not want to say, but I imagine your planing to place more users per a node on the current servers? Specially when it comes to CPU if you leave packages as they are your be hugely under provisioned.

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Right, we have 3x the resources so we can put 3x the users. This helps us consolidate, remove rack space we don’t need, improve how our power is handled, improve network connectivity, etc.

Francisco

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Any chance you’d sell a couple as dedis for long time customers? If not I still wouldn’t mind buying one if you sell them individually.

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@Francisco which 1u case will you using for the asrock bord, and which cooler? Does the IO shield fit? Will you use m.2 nvme drives or u.2 nvme drives with a pcie x8 to 2 u.2 ports? Looks interesting

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Looks like one of my BuyVM VPSes was upgraded today :slight_smile:

processor       : 0
vendor_id       : AuthenticAMD
cpu family      : 23
model           : 113
model name      : AMD Ryzen 9 3900X 12-Core Processor
stepping        : 0
microcode       : 0x1000065
cpu MHz         : 3792.872
cache size      : 512 KB
physical id     : 0
siblings        : 1
core id         : 0
cpu cores       : 1
apicid          : 0
initial apicid  : 0
fpu             : yes
fpu_exception   : yes
cpuid level     : 13
wp              : yes
flags           : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush mmx fxsr sse sse2 syscall nx mmxext fxsr_opt pdpe1gb rdtscp lm rep_good nopl cpuid extd_apicid tsc_known_freq pni pclmulqdq ssse3 fma cx16 sse4_1 sse4_2 x2apic movbe popcnt tsc_deadline_timer aes xsave avx f16c rdrand hypervisor lahf_lm cmp_legacy svm cr8_legacy abm sse4a misalignsse 3dnowprefetch osvw perfctr_core ssbd ibpb vmmcall fsgsbase tsc_adjust bmi1 avx2 smep bmi2 rdseed adx smap clflushopt clwb sha_ni xsaveopt xsavec xgetbv1 arat npt nrip_save umip
bugs            : fxsave_leak sysret_ss_attrs spectre_v1 spectre_v2 spec_store_bypass
bogomips        : 7585.74
TLB size        : 1024 4K pages
clflush size    : 64
cache_alignment : 64
address sizes   : 40 bits physical, 48 bits virtual
power management:

Thanks @Francisco

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LV location?