Benefit 5400 vs 5300 with Citrix

[idata]

I have budget for buying 15 Citrix servers.

I have been offered

Proliant DL360R05 X/E5345-2 4GB (2 x QC 2.33 Ghz 1333 FSB (2 x 4MB cache) with 4 x 1 GB memory and SA P400 -256-BBWC and RPS, 2 x SAS 72GB 10K disks, which is a pre-configured bundle

I can let them assemble

Proliant DL360R05 E/5420-2 4GB (2 x QC 2.50 Ghz 1333 FSB (2 x 6MB cache) with 4 x 1 GB memory and SA P400i-256-BBWC and RPS, 2 x SAS 72 GB 10K disks, for about the same parts prise. This machine has to be assembled so that's going to cost me Euro's.

The servers will have Citrix PS 4.5 / Windows 2003 Standard 32bit. Each Citrix servers wil host about 25-30 heavy users and support passthrough for heavy applications.

Beside the slide Ghz difference in both proccessors, which configuration will be the best for my situation?

Does the Intel 5400 series have major benefits for me over the Intel 5300 series?

Shoud I consider buying higher CPU speed at the cost of the number of servers (buying 13 servers high PCU servers instead of 15) or vice versa?

Thanks,

Roland

[idata]

Roland, As with any performance testing the software and hardware configuration will matter. However, I got a similar question on Citrix scaling from a health care account in Canada. We shared the following data with them comparing the Xeon 5400 (2nd gen quads) vs Xeon 5300 (1st gen quads) using Citrix. Performance testing showed that the max number of client sessions that can be connected to Citrix presentation server with acceptable performance was (694) and (482) for the Xeon 5400 and 5300 respectively - a 43% scaling advantage. As a result I would expect that you will find that with all other things being equal the 5400 will most likely provide better performance than the 5300 in your Citrix environment. Chris