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
>
>
>
>
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