you may also want to consider KVM, blessed and chosen by rhel, available in centos5.4, presumably compute intensive stuff run inside a VM under KVM is essentially on the bare metal. On Wed, Dec 23, 2009 at 11:41 AM, Randy Clarksean <rclarksean at arvig.net>wrote: > Thanks for the information - I will look at Xenserver ... I am assuming it > is a bare metal approach? > > Your point is well taken about what I am doing and whether the approach is > good or not. I need the box for two operating systems for computational > work. I need to run a Windows flavor and I need to run Linux. There will > be a performance hit, but based on what I have read, the hit is less for > "bare metal" virtual approaches ... than it is for the situation where it > runs within another platform. > > -----Original Message----- > From: Josh Welch [mailto:josh at joshwelch.com] > Sent: Tuesday, December 22, 2009 9:26 AM > To: Randy Clarksean; tclug-list > Subject: Re: [tclug-list] Hardware Question - 64 bit > > In order to install a 64 bit version of an operating system in ESXi > (probably ESX too but I know this for a fact with ESXi) the processors > need to have virtualization capabilities built in, Intel refers to it > as VT and AMD uses AMD-V IIRC. The x850 stuff from Dell pre-dates > virtualization capabilities being embedded in processors, or at least > they didn't ship any of it in the x850 series. > > If you wanted to run virtual 64 bit linux instances on there you > should be able to do so with XenServer or one of the other Linux based > virtualization solutions. If you're looking to use it as a compute > resource I'm not sure that virtualization is the right track for you > to b following but there you go. > > Josh > > On Tue, Dec 22, 2009 at 9:12 AM, Randy Clarksean <rclarksean at arvig.net> > wrote: > > Ok .. just purchased a used Dell PowerEdge 6850 on Ebay. 4 CPUs at 3.16 > > GHz. I purchased it to make a computational box out of it ... wanting > the > 8 > > cores and lots of memory. > > > > Now ... I put VMWare ESxi 4.0 on it and was installing a 64 bit version > of > > Scientific Linux. During the install ... it tells me that I can not > install > > a 64 bit version ... and that I should install a 32 bit version. > > > > The CPU details are listed below ... I THOUGHT these were 64 bit CPUs ... > > did I mess up? > > > > 3.16GHZ INTEL XEON-MP 667MHZ SOCKET 604 1MB SL84U > > > > Thoughts and comments welcome. Thanks in advance. > > > > Randy > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mailman.mn-linux.org/pipermail/tclug-list/attachments/20091223/ccb6b8ad/attachment.htm