[CentOS] Xen cpu requirements

David Dyer-Bennet dd-b at dd-b.net
Wed Jul 14 18:47:00 UTC 2010


On Wed, July 14, 2010 12:55, Brian Mathis wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 14, 2010 at 1:49 PM, Dominik Zyla <gavroche at gavroche.pl>
> wrote:
>> On Wed, Jul 14, 2010 at 12:32:12PM -0500, David Dyer-Bennet wrote:
>>> I'm installing Centos 5.5 on a new Dell R301 server.  I wanted to run
>>> Xen
>>> and have the full virtualization possibilities (this is our development
>>> support server, so it runs a few real services and is available for
>>> playing with things; putting the "playing with things" functions into
>>> virtual servers would protect the "few real services", and make it
>>> easier
>>> to clean up afterwards).
>>>
>>> I have enabled virtualization support in the BIOS.
>>>
>>> /proc/cpuinfo says I have
>>> model name      : Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU           X3450  @ 2.67GHz
>>>
>>> and
>>>
>>> flags           : fpu tsc msr pae cx8 apic mtrr cmov pat clflush acpi
>>> mmx
>>> fxsr sse sse2 ss ht syscall nx lm constant_tsc ida pni est ssse3 cx16
>>> sse4_1 sse4_2 popcnt lahf_lm
>>>
>>> The "vmx" flag doesn't appear to be set.
>>>
>>> (I'm working from
>>> <http://www.centos.org/docs/5/html/Virtualization-en-US/ch-op-sys-support.html>,
>>> by the way; I note that document is from 2007 or maybe even 2006, so
>>> perhaps some things aren't fully up-to-date.)
>>>
>>> So, does that mean my Xeon-based server doesn't have hardware
>>> virtualization assistance?

> You might need to go into the BIOS and enable VT extensions.  Many
> systems ship with them disabled.

I found one BIOS entry, "Virtualization technology"; it was initially
disabled, but I enabled it before I installed CENTOS, and verified that it
was still enabled later (I reported enabling it in my original message). 
I'll check for other suspicious BIOS entries, but more than one for this
would be unusual, wouldn't it?

-- 
David Dyer-Bennet, dd-b at dd-b.net; http://dd-b.net/
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