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Virtual Machines

CHPC operates and maintains two virtual machine (VM) farms which are available to researchers. One is for general use, and one is in the protected environment (PE) for researchers working with sensitive data, such as Protected Health Information (PHI). 

We have left the  specification for the old VM hardware, Prismatic and Sawmill. as it will remain in service, running for at least a coupe more years.

    Current VM Hardware

    Current VM farm is called VM Farm in the GE, and PE-VM Farm in the PE. The general environment has 4 servers, and the PE has 3 servers. Each serger consists of:

    • 2x AMD EPYC 9334 32-Core Processor (64 physical cores)
    • 1.5 TB RAM
    • 2 x 100G ethernet cards

    The storage is decoupled from the compute, and is located in the GE Vast and PE Vast network file systems.

    For more information about access and allocation of the general VM farm, please see:

    Pricing of VMs:

    The VM pricing model is based on a block sizing increment, with five different block sizes available, and the cost  based on the cost of the hardware and the number of blocks available to sell.The prices are for a 5 year time period (based on the hardware being purchased with a 5 year warranty), and subject to change based on hardware and internal costs. If you need resources beyond what is listed, please contact CHPC at helpdesk@chpc.utah.edu.

      VM description
    VM Size RAM (GB) Cores Storage (GB) Price for 5 years
    Small 8 2 50 $550
    Medium 16 4 100 $800
    Large 32 8 200 $1250
    XLarge 64 12 400 $2200
    2XLarge 96 12 800 $4100

     

    A limited amount of additional storage local to the VM is available, in 100GB increments, at a cost of $1300/TB. 

    All of the above pricing are internal rates, for University of Utah research projects. Contact CHPC at helpdesk@chpc.utah.edu for pricing for non University of Utah research funded projects.

    In addition to the above pricing,  there will be additional charges for customization, beyond the base VM installation, at a rate of $75/hour.  Please work with CHPC to obtain an estimate of the cost of a VM deployment. 

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    Old VM Farm Hardware Specs

    The second generation GE VM farm is named Sawmill 2 and PE VM farm is named Prismatic 2. Each of the VM farms is comprised of two servers, and is capable of having an additional two servers added.  Each server has:

    • an AMD Epyc  7502P processor (2.5 GHz, 32 physical cores)
    •  512 GB RAM
    • 2 x 40G ethernet cards

    The storage is a Seagate STX-2U12 RAID disk enclosure, with 12 x 3.84 TB self encrypted SSDs.

    The first generation general VM farm is named Sawmill. It is comprised of four Dell  R7425 servers:

    • 2 x AMD Epyc 7351 procs (2.4 GHz cores each, 16 cores/proc) per server
    •  Each server has 512 GB RAM
    • 2 x 40G ethernet cards

    The storage was a Dell Compellent tray, with SSD for front end caching, spinning drives for storage, and an usable  capacity of 90TB.

    The first generation VM farm in the PE (Prismatic) is comprised of four Dell R730 servers, each with:

    • 24 3GHz cores (2x Intel 2687W-v4) 
    • 384GB RAM 
    • 2x 40G ethernet cards

    Prismatic storage is comprised of a disk tray containing:

    • 12x 3.8TB  SSDs (not encrypted)
    • 12x 2TB self encrypting 7.2K spinning drives

    Note that the PE group space can also be used in conjunction with any Prismatic VM. 

    Accounting for fail-over and maintenance, this provides total usable resources of:

    • 72 3GHz cores
    • 1.1TB RAM 
    • 30TB SSD storage
    • 16TB encrypting spinning storage
    Last Updated: 7/15/25