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Intel discontinuing my VPS CPU generation, should I worry?

VPS Hosting by GeorgeNmp 50 replies 5.8K views
GeorgeNmp

Member OP

AS64512

11 #1

Intel discontinuing Xeon E5 v4 / Broadwell-EP support got me checking whether my VPS at Contabo is affected. Short answer: probably not in any meaningful way.

The abstraction layer in KVM or VMware means you are not directly exposed to CPU stepping errata or microcode update paths. Your provider handles that. What matters to you is the performance class and whether Contabo migrates you to newer hardware voluntarily or lets you age out on slower nodes.

The real question is whether this triggers a fleet refresh at your provider. If they run their own metal, EOL means parts scarcity. If they lease from upstream, the upstream eats the depreciation. Either way your BGP communities and RPKI ROAs do not care what CPU generation signs the packets.

Has anyone here actually noticed a migration notification from a budget provider when hardware EOLs? I am curious whether the low end of the ma

iBGP, eBGP, don't care, just peer
steveipw

Member

3 #2

For that money you get what you get

Contabo runs Supermicro storage nodes with E5 v4 in their archive tier last I checked auction listings

Specs from memory:

  • X10DRi motherboard
  • 12x HGST 4TB SATA
  • LSI 9211-8I HBA
  • 64GB DDR4 RDIMM

If they refresh to Ice Lake or newer they will probably re-deploy these as cold storage at Hetzner or similar

Your VPS CPU is not the same as the storage controller CPU anyway

zfs send | zfs receive. repeat.
Lagos

Member

#3

Backorder a better domain instead of worrying about silicon

I saw someone running their "infra" on a .host domain last week. Premium .io backorder cost me less than a year of that VPS and I flipped it for 4x. Your domain choice signals more about your operation than your CPU generation ever will.

Contabo.com? Generic. Could be on ARM for all anyone knows. Knownhost.com with a backordered drop? That tells a story.

ST

Member

#4

Thread is about VPS hardware, not domains. Stay on topic.

josemcelroy

Member

2 #5

Honestly I dont think anyone at the low end even knows what cpu they have and the providers sure arent going to tell you unless you run lscpu yourself and even then its just a model string that means nothing because youre on a shared socket with fifteen other tenants fighting for the same avx units

lucgone

Member

Le Baguette

#6
GeorgeNmp said:
The abstraction layer in KVM or VMware

I have make a test on my VPS at OVHcloud since 2 days, I run lscpu and it show Xeon E5 v3 lol. It is possible to do that? The provider say "modern hardware" on their page 😅

But honestly my website is loading fast, the ping is good, so I dont care about the generation. Maybe I will migrate to Vultr if they have better offer, I see they publish AMD EPYC on their status page. Mdr

Lucgone is not technical like you @GeorgeNmp but I think you are right, the abstraction is protecting us

Vive la résistance... électrique
BE

Member

#7

Steveipw which LSI firmware, IT or IR mode

steveipw

Member

#8
beta20 said:
Steveipw which LSI firmware, IT or IR mode

IT mode. These are pure HBA passthrough boxes, no RAID on the card. Contabo runs Ceph or similar on top, they need the raw disks.

You can tell because IR mode firmware would show the MegaRAID bios string in dmesg and nobody running Ceph wants that overhead.

zfs send | zfs receive. repeat.
BE

Member

#9

Thanks. That explains why they are so cheap for storage. No BBU, no cache, just disks and ethernet.

josemcelroy

Member

#10
lucgone said:
I have make a test on my VPS at OVHcloud since 2 days, I run lscpu and it show Xeon E5 v3 lol.

Absolutely possible. OVHcloud has been shuffling hardware between their BHS and RBX datacenters for years. You can get a "VPS 2016" plan that lands on anything from Haswell to Cascade Lake depending on which bin the scheduler picks.

The "modern hardware" claim is marketing speak for "we still power it on."

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