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.<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Wed, Dec 23, 2009 at 11:41 AM, Randy Clarksean <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:rclarksean@arvig.net">rclarksean@arvig.net</a>></span> wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">Thanks for the information - I will look at Xenserver ... I am assuming it<br>
is a bare metal approach?<br>
<br>
Your point is well taken about what I am doing and whether the approach is<br>
good or not. I need the box for two operating systems for computational<br>
work. I need to run a Windows flavor and I need to run Linux. There will<br>
be a performance hit, but based on what I have read, the hit is less for<br>
"bare metal" virtual approaches ... than it is for the situation where it<br>
runs within another platform.<br>
<div class="im"><br>
-----Original Message-----<br>
From: Josh Welch [mailto:<a href="mailto:josh@joshwelch.com">josh@joshwelch.com</a>]<br>
Sent: Tuesday, December 22, 2009 9:26 AM<br>
To: Randy Clarksean; tclug-list<br>
Subject: Re: [tclug-list] Hardware Question - 64 bit<br>
<br>
</div><div><div></div><div class="h5">In order to install a 64 bit version of an operating system in ESXi<br>
(probably ESX too but I know this for a fact with ESXi) the processors<br>
need to have virtualization capabilities built in, Intel refers to it<br>
as VT and AMD uses AMD-V IIRC. The x850 stuff from Dell pre-dates<br>
virtualization capabilities being embedded in processors, or at least<br>
they didn't ship any of it in the x850 series.<br>
<br>
If you wanted to run virtual 64 bit linux instances on there you<br>
should be able to do so with XenServer or one of the other Linux based<br>
virtualization solutions. If you're looking to use it as a compute<br>
resource I'm not sure that virtualization is the right track for you<br>
to b following but there you go.<br>
<br>
Josh<br>
<br>
On Tue, Dec 22, 2009 at 9:12 AM, Randy Clarksean <<a href="mailto:rclarksean@arvig.net">rclarksean@arvig.net</a>><br>
wrote:<br>
> Ok .. just purchased a used Dell PowerEdge 6850 on Ebay. 4 CPUs at 3.16<br>
> GHz. I purchased it to make a computational box out of it ... wanting the<br>
8<br>
> cores and lots of memory.<br>
><br>
> Now ... I put VMWare ESxi 4.0 on it and was installing a 64 bit version of<br>
> Scientific Linux. During the install ... it tells me that I can not<br>
install<br>
> a 64 bit version ... and that I should install a 32 bit version.<br>
><br>
> The CPU details are listed below ... I THOUGHT these were 64 bit CPUs ...<br>
> did I mess up?<br>
><br>
> 3.16GHZ INTEL XEON-MP 667MHZ SOCKET 604 1MB SL84U<br>
><br>
> Thoughts and comments welcome. Thanks in advance.<br>
><br>
> Randy</div></div></blockquote></div>