5K series Nehalem Processors vs 7K series pre-Nehalem

[idata]

I need to get a confirmation on some things. I am building a new cluster for VMware which will host companies entire environment with hgihly used Citrix servers. Company is 80 users so its not enterprise class project so we are clear on that. I originally quoted 2 servers from Dell R900's using 4 X E7440 Xeon Four Cores, 2.4GHz, 16M Cache 1066Mhz FSB with a shared storage obviously. I then noticed somewhere the Nehalem supposed improvements so i came to Intel.com to check out benchmark assessments.

I looked at the vMark for VMware benchmark on the following:

70000

http://www.intel.com/performance/server/xeon_mp/virtualization.htm?iid=perf_server_lhn+mp_vt http://www.intel.com/performance/server/xeon_mp/virtualization.htm?iid=perf_server_lhn+mp_vt

5000 nahelam

http://www.intel.com/performance/server/xeon/virtualization.htm?iid=perf_server_lhn+dp_vt http://www.intel.com/performance/server/xeon/virtualization.htm?iid=perf_server_lhn+dp_vt

The Nehalem 5570 server which was configured with only 2 processors (as per the configuration details on the page) outpreformed the Intel® Xeon® Processor 7400 Series processor by a considerable difference. I wanted to check to make sure that numbers here on the benchmark represent actual results recorded and have not been tweeked to represent per processor statistics( I assume it has not but with these readings I need to be sure).

Also i want to make sure and hear it from someone form Intel that a server with 2 Nehalem 5000 series processors will out preform the 7000 series server which uses 4!! (or even two for that matter) processor utilizing the FSB (pre Quick Path-pre Nehalem).

Also as I understand 7000 series processors were suppose to release Nehalem-EX this quorter, has that happened?

5000 series servers are MUCH cheaper and if they are prefroming faster with nehalem then its madness to buy 70000 series until the nahelem-ex is released.

[Daniel_O_Intel]

If you don't get any responses here, you can also try over in the processor forums

http://communities.intel.com/community/tech/processors