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Maint
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Does ESXi use AMD-V

I am trying to decide between two white boxes to run my ESXi on; an AMD 64 X2 4200 - 8GB or P4 Prescott 3.0 HT - 4GB. Both will use a LSI-150 4port SATA RAID card. The P4 is on a Supermicro server board so there is a PCI-X slot while the AMD only has a regular PCI slot for the RAID card. So it's more memory vs. faster disk IO. But does ESXi utilize the AMD's 64bit and AMD-V extensions ? If it does, this would give the edge to the AMD setup.

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Jasemccarty
Immortal
Immortal

ESXi supports Intel VT and AMD-V

Jase McCarty

http://www.jasemccarty.com

Co-Author of VMware ESX Essentials in the Virtual Data Center

(ISBN:1420070274) from Auerbach

Jase McCarty - @jasemccarty
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Maint
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What I'm looking for is does ESXi use the extra features of an AMD including AMD-V to improve performance over a P4.

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Jasemccarty
Immortal
Immortal

I can't recall off the top of my head as to what all it supports, but it does leverage the AMD-V instructions, therefore giving better performance than an Intel P4 HT under the right conditions.

The big question is, are you going to be doing any type of processing that the AMD-V instructions will benefit you.

What's the cost difference? Are you going to use this in production? How many VM's are you planning to run on this ESXi installation?

There are a lot of variables.

Jase McCarty - @jasemccarty
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