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.
ESXi supports Intel VT and AMD-V
Jase McCarty
Co-Author of VMware ESX Essentials in the Virtual Data Center
(ISBN:1420070274) from Auerbach
What I'm looking for is does ESXi use the extra features of an AMD including AMD-V to improve performance over a P4.
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.