hardware guidence

[Ed Wilts]

On Tue, Jun 28, 2005 at 12:57:32PM -0400, Tom Greaser wrote:
> Im looking at getting a developement workstation to 
> work with XEN. Im looking at a dual AMD 64 box.. 
>  
> Anyone know of  any good already put together systems out there.. 
> Thanks.. 
>  
> PS.. if you think Intel is the way to go.. I will listen but, from what
> ive read 
> about HyperTransport.. thats what i should do for XEN type stuff.. 

At the Summit, the presenters (one from Red Hat, one from Intel) were
showing off Xen on an Intel chip with VT support.  With this support,
you can install unmodified clients in Xen.  I just did a quick search on
Intel's web site and came up with this describing the technology:
http://www.intel.com/cd/ids/developer/asmo-na/eng/221962.htm
http://cache-www.intel.com/cd/00/00/22/19/221961_221961.pdf

Although I do like AMD CPUs, Intel, seems to be a key contributor to the
Xen technology with about 30 developers dedicated to the project
(according to their keynote at the Summit).

I don't know what the availability of the VT technology is, but it seems
to me that if your goal is just Xen, this is worthwhile looking at.  On
the other hand, if you only have Fedora guests on your server, then an
AMD processor will work - pretty much evertyhing else needs a change to
the guest OS to boot.

You should know that 64-bit support isn't in Xen yet.  It's only the
32-bit stuff that sort of works some of the time today.

See also http://fedora.redhat.com/projects/virtualization/.  The right
list to discuss virtualization is fedore-devel-list.

-- 
Ed Wilts, RHCE
Mounds View, MN, USA
mailto:ewilts at ewilts.org
Member #1, Red Hat Community Ambassador Program