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