I have a client that is having some performance issues with some of their current desktops. They work in mostly Adobe products (Indesign/Photoshop/Acrobat) and are wanting to upgrade. Currently they are using i7-6700’s with GTX 745’s.
The client came to me with the idea of ‘a badass server that everyone can use’. And as I am a fan of XCP, and love the idea of a few VM’s and a thin client, I am not sure its the best solution.
If I was to go down that route, (we are talking about at most 3-5 users) from my research, Adobe is STILL, in 2022, does not leverage multi-core processors. So here are a few thoughts/configs I had in mind.
AMD/DIY Based
5950x (as on paper, it seems that this has much better single core performance than a Xeon based)
2 - 7150x2’s GPUs (this seems like it can be carved up into 4? GPU’s for the vm’s and is compatable with XCP without stupid NVDA license fee’s, however I am still not sure if the 5950x will have enough PCIe lanes)
Off the Shelf Server
2-Xeon Gold 5118 (12 core, 2.3ghz base, 3.2 turbo)
same GPU’s as above
More Processor, but lower single core performance and lower clock speed.
I am just looking to get some input on this project (we are not opposed to building a few rack based ‘desktops’ but the idea is to have the staff have a thin client/laptop that they remote into for the performance)
I’ve built VDI environments for CPU and graphic intense applications and it isn’t cheap. You’ll need some type of graphic acceleration card, but I haven’t touched the S7150 x2. I’ve only worked with the Nvidia GRID cards. Since you only have 3-5 users I would likely just invest in new desktops. Also if the application is only single threaded, you really should look at a low core count proc with the highest clock speed you can find.
What type of thin client/protocol are you looking at for remote access?
Check the licensing! Last time I looked into this Adobe does not permit remote work for it’s products, or our license did not allow this to be used (not sure which). Named user licenses might be OK, but not sure about device licenses. On the Adobe site I did see something about installing on a Microsoft RDS server, so there is some guidance to make this work, but you’ll need to do some digging.
I know this is a little old, but here is my insight:
Adobe can be graphic card intensive so in this situation, using VMs is not the best way to go. Where VMs really come into play is if you are hosting multiple servers on one machine. I have a setup with two physical servers with several VMs such as mail, web, vpn, and a test vm for linux based software. It all comes down to what is being done on adobe.