VMware Infrastructure 3 Enterprise Support on rx4640 (AMD 64 bit)

[Nik Patel]

Does anyone know if HP rx4640 can support VMware ESX 3 but using a 64 bit MAD chip as VMware ESX does not support IA-64?

[Torsten.]

According to the compat guide it runs on Proliant only, not on Integrity.

http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vi3_systems_guide.pdf

But have a look at HP Integrity Virtual Machines. The idea is very close to VMware and you can run HP-UX, Windows and Linux guests on Integrity servers.

[Duncan Edmonstone]

VMware products are all x86 only (be that x86_32 or x86_64), so no VMware product will run on a system with IA64 processors.

Youe choices on IA64 are as Torsten indicated currently limited to HP Integrity Virtual Machines:

http://h71028.www7.hp.com/enterprise/cache/262803-0-0-0-121.html

At some point in the future the RHEL and SUSE Linux platforms on IA64 will support Xen (RHEL 5 already does in what they call 'Technology Preview' - i.e. not for production and no support) - but it remains to be seen whether HP will support that on Integrity Servers.

VMware have shown no signs of wanting to make their products available on anything but x86.

HTH

Duncan

[Nik Patel]

Thanks guys, So will VMware not even support the AMD 64 bit chip? I saw the systems compat. guide but thought someone may have tried an integrity server running a 64 bit AMD chip with vmware...

Are there any issues with the vmware host being 64 bit and running 32 bit OS's??

[Heironimus]

HP Integrity servers do not use AMD 64-bit processors. They use Intel Itanium 64-bit processors (IA64). Some HP Proliants use AMD Opterons, which can run 64-bit. The rest of the Proliants use Xeons, and the current generation of Xeons are also 64-bit capable.

The Opterons are x86-compatible with 64-bit extensions (x86_64), just like all the newer Xeons are x86-compatible but with the EM64T 64-bit extensions. VMware works on all of them. Actually it usually runs very well on multiprocessor Opterons because they have great memory bandwidth. You can run 32-bit guests on x86_64 hardware without issue.