GR2008 1 posts since
Oct 13, 2008
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40.
Re: Dell Precision T3400, ESXi, something else, or forget virtualization? Jul 29, 2009 1:14 PM
I was able to find a solution to getting VMWare ESXi version 4.0 installed on a Dell Precision T3400 system & support 64 Bit Virtual Machines. I did not have any problems installing ESXi on the system once I changed the SATA settings to be RAID with ATA functionality if there are not any active RAID drives. I did have problems trying to set up 64 bit VM's on this system though. After reading articles, I determined that it was my processor series that I had installed on my T3400 system. When we purchased the T3400, we selected a low end processor for this system. We had the Intel Core 2 Duo E4600 series processor. You would want to compare your processor with what Intel shows as having the virtualization functionality built into it. The Intel article can be located at
http://www.intel.com/products/processor/core2duo/specifications.htm?iid=prod_core2duo+tab_spec for Core 2 Duo processors. Core 2 Quad processors can be located at
http://www.intel.com/products/processor/core2quad/specifications.htm.
I replaced the processor with an Intel Core 2 Duo 6300 series process running at 1.86 GHz. The 6300 series does have the Intel Virtualization Technology (VT) functionality. Once I installed the 6300 series processor, I looked in the BIOS. In the Performance tab, there was a new option available for Virtualization. I enabled that feature & then performed a clean install of VMWare ESXi 4.0 on the system.
After finishing the setup, I then started a VMWare convert to move a 64 Bit virtual machine onto the T3400 system. It finally accepted the T3400 as an acceptable location for 64 Bit virtual machines. Prior to processor replacement and SATA changes in the BIOS, I could not perform a VMWare convert targeting the T3400 system. Every time that I tried to select the T3400 system, VMWare convert would come back saying that the T3400 does not support 64 Bit virtual machines.
in response to: malaysiavm
