[CentOS] Dual Opteron or Dual Xeon?

Thu Oct 26 20:38:48 UTC 2006
Aleksandar Milivojevic <alex at milivojevic.org>

Quoting Mike Kercher <mike at vesol.com>:

> I am about to lease another server to be a backup web/mail server with a
> replicated mysql database.  The current live server is a dual Xeon
> 2.8Ghz.  Would I do better to get another Xeon server or an Opteron
> based server?  My concerns are compatibility of the database and the SSL
> certificate currently running on the Xeon machine.  Are these concerns
> unfounded?

If compatibility of MySQL database and certificates are your only  
concerns, it doesn't matter what you get.  You can even get something  
with UltraSPARC or Alpha processor.  Or you could get Cray  
supercomputer.  It'll just work.

The certificates are normally just text files.  You can move them  
between machines or operating systems, as long as name of machine  
(and/or IP addresses) match the names and/or IP addresses for which  
the certificate is issued.  This would be whatever is stored in CN and  
AltSubjectName fields in the certificate.  You can use "openssl x509  
-in certfile.txt -noout -text" to dump out certificate in human  
readable format.

MySQL is just an application.  If the hardware and OS are supported by  
MySQL, you are fine.  Linux is supported on all Intel and AMD  
processors.  So you are fine there.

There is only one thing to watch out for both Xeon and Opteron.  If  
your current Xeon is 32-bit, and the new processor (even if it is  
Xeon) is 64-bit, *and* you install 64-bit version of Linux *and*  
64-bit MySQL binaries, you can't just copy binary database files to  
the new machine.  It probably won't work.  Well, maybe it would, but I  
would very strongly recommend against it.  Use mysqldump to dump  
database into file, and re-imort it on new machine.  Or setup  
replication between two machines.  This is recommended even when  
moving database between two identical machines anyhow.

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