Hiding NX flag on ESX 2.5 ?

[toha]

Hi,

I have Dell 2850 with ESX version 2.5.2 and Dell 2950 (E5320) with ESX3.0.1 versions. I'm trying to move guest from 2850 to 2950. I've read that I need to hide NX flag to make this possible. On options -> advanced -> advanced this button is greyed out, so what would be the right thing to do? Do I need to edit vpxd.cfg on virtualcenter machine (VC is version 2.0.1) -- and how should I edit it?

[steve_higgins]

The new Patch 2 for Virtual Center 2.0.1 supports editing the config file. They have documentation available on how to disable certain feature bits of CPUs. You must be running Patch 2 though.

[toha]

Do you mean this document:

http://kb.vmware.com/vmtnkb/search.do?cmd=displayKC&docType=kc&externalId=1993&sliceId=SAL_Public

?

Do you know if the masking is per VM or is it a global setting? And if I eg. use that SSE3/SSE4 combination, does it mean that NX flag is disabled when applying that configuration?

[steve_higgins]

Yes, that is the document.

It is done one of 2 ways. You disable the feature bit for all of VC (all VMs, all clusters). Or you edit each VMs CPU feature bits.

The NX flag is a separate feature bit, not SSE3/SSE4.

These are the 2 lines that are entered into the VM's VMX file when disabling the NX bit through the VI client. You can see Intel and AMD are slightly different:

cpuid.80000001.edx = "--

---

0--

---

"

cpuid.80000001.edx.amd = "--

---

0--

---

"

Modify the above 2 lines to edit your vpxd.cfg file on VC server to disable the NX bit without disabling SSE3/SSE4.