Comments on: Heads-Up: VMware ESX Going Exclusively 64-Bit

By: Mark Dean

Mark Dean — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 16:50:20 +0000

HP P-class BL-25P/45P G2/G3 are AMD-V and AMD64 capable as well as C-Class systems. I push AMD heavily for virtualization so I’m not as familiar with Intel based blades and rack servers.

By: Bob Plankers

Bob Plankers — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 17:47:21 +0000

Yes, anything from Dell named with a T or an R is newer than an 1850, and therefore will work fine.

By: Matt McSpirit

Matt McSpirit — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 15:08:10 +0000

Hi,

With regards to point #1 – I’ve got a couple of PowerEdge T605′s that enable me to turn on/off the Virtualisation Technology on the chipset, so it should be able to run ESX4.

Hyper-V requires it on the chipset, and as Dan C pointed out, XenServer 5 needs them for Windows guest VMs.

Just make sure the bios is up to date!

Matt

By: Bookmarks for November 13th through November 18th at edsmiley.com

Bookmarks for November 13th through November 18th at edsmiley.com — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 19:03:17 +0000

[...] Heads-Up: VMware ESX Going Exclusively 64-Bit : Bob Plankers, The Lone Sysadmin – There are several mentions of this out in the blogosphere, plus it was talked about openly at VMworld by VMware staff in presentations and labs. It’s worth mentioning again because people don’t seem to be catching on: Future versions of VMware ESX/ESXi will only run on 64-bit-capable CPUs. « Bookmarks for November 11th through November 12th [...]

By: damien gill

damien gill — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 13:41:07 +0000

i dont see this as an issue for HP anyway, All HP G5 servers(300 and 500 series models) allow you to enable intel VT support on the bios.

By: Virtualization Industry News « Virtualization news for the channel community and you !

Mon, 17 Nov 2008 09:14:29 +0000

[...] VMware ESX is going exclusively 64bit (more) [...]

By: Bob Plankers

Bob Plankers — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 18:39:08 +0000

@Dan C — thanks. Took some vacation, am back now, trying to write more.

Also, AMD-V was the term I was looking for, for whatever reason I couldn’t find it.

Thanks guys!

By: Dan C

Dan C — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 15:56:40 +0000

Generally speaking the 3-digit DDR Opterons are plain AMD64 and 4-digit DDR2 Opterons are AMD64 with AMD-V, which makes them relatively easy to spot. There’s a pretty concise and useful list of the varieties on Wikipedia.

By: Mike Hays

Mike Hays — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 15:06:54 +0000

“the ESX console OS will only work on CPUs capable of Intel VT & EM64T”

ESX will also run on supported hardware platforms using AMD64 and AMD-V enabled processors. You’ll have to check the system compatibility list when it comes out, but all Opterons sold in the last 4-5 years (and all HP DL385 and DL585 servers) are AMD64 and AMD-V.

By: aharden

aharden — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 13:21:40 +0000

I’ve been using Opterons for ESX more often than not since I’ve deployed it, so I’m hoping that’s enough to make ESX 4.0 compatible with my older HP DL585 G1 hosts. Guess I should join the beta to find out. Thanks for the info, Bob.

By: Dan C

Dan C — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 23:13:07 +0000

PS: You can check for the Intel and AMD flags with “grep -E ‘(vmx|svm)’ /proc/cpuinfo” respectively.

By: Dan C

Dan C — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 23:09:45 +0000

It’s good to see you writing again.

Like Hyper-V, Citrix Xenserver is also a native 64bit-only hypervisor. Although that’s not necessarily a surprise given the other likenesses they share.

I don’t know about Hyper-V but Xenserver will run non-Windows guests on a 64bit processor without Intel-VT/AMD-V extensions. I suspect that ESX4 could be the same?

By: daniel Eason

daniel Eason — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 21:39:29 +0000

Hyper-V made this mistake!