ESXi 4.0 on VMware Workstation 7 with AMD-V

[yojimbouk]

I want to play around with creating VI in a box having the ESX server, SAN and vCenter servers all virtualized on the same machine.

So I set up a test machine with an ASUS M4N78-AM motherboard and Athlon 64 X2 5400+ CPU (Brisbane core). I believe I've enabled hardware virtualization in the BIOS (secure virtual machine mode) and the CPU supports the AMD-V extensions.

The OS is XP x64 and the machine had 4GB RAM.

However, when I power up the ESX VM I get a message saying the CPU will not support all of the features of worksation and it reverts to software based virtualization. I do not have this problem with my Core 2 Duo notebook.

So which of these is the case?

1) AMD-V doesn't support the features required for nested VMs.

2) My motherboard doesn't support AMD-V even though the CPU does.

Jim.

[Troy_Clavell]

have a look at this document

http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-8970

AMD-V Hosts

AMD-V is supported on Rev F and later Family 0FH AMD64 processors, but current VMware products only support AMD-V on Family 10H or later AMD64 processors (Barcelona or Phenom). Thus, you can use AMD-V on Family 0FH Rev F and Rev G processors with Workstation 6.0. However, you need a Family 10H processor to use AMD-V with ESX 3.5 and Workstation 6.5.

[yojimbouk]

Processor is family 15, stepping G2. Is this not supported?

[Troy_Clavell]

according to this KB, your CPU is not supported, but I could be wrong.

http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1003945

Hopefully will chime in.

[ksc]

Yes, the 1st-generation AMD-V implementation is lacking enough features that we don't support the hardware virtualization mode anymore on Family 0FH RevF / RevG cores (Windsor / Brisbane). Support was removed between WS6.0 and WS6.5 - as I recall, it took a lot of code complexity to code around the limitations, performance never was as good as our binary-translation implementation, so it got dropped. (If 1st-generation Intel VT were not absolutely necessary to run 64-bit VMs on Intel chips, it likely would have been dropped too.)

The 2nd-generation AMD-V implementation (with RVI) has full support - which means Family 10H RevB / RevC. Phenom or Athlon II, or Opteron with part numbers beginning 13xx, 23xx, 83xx. Athlon X2 Brisbane is 0FH and doesn't work, Athlon X2 Kuma is 10H and does work.

[yojimbouk]

Thanks to all.