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T7500 and VT-d
I'm trying to find info whether vt-d is enabled on t7500 workstation. Checked the processor specs (X5570) and chipset (5520) on Intel site - both seem to support vt-d .
But I can find anything on the matter in the manual - can anyone shed some light on this?
speedstep
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October 6th, 2017 06:00
VT-d is more than just specs. The BIOS and chipset and processor must all support this. The 7500 is not a power edge rack server suitable for VMWARE ESX all versions.
Intel® Virtualization Technology for Directed I/O (VT-d) is not offered as a feature only (VT-x) is based on XP and virtual pc 2007.
Current ESX and Hyper-V requires Second Level Address Translation (SLAT) -- present in the current generation of 64-bit processors by Intel and AMD. This is not present in Many previous generation 2006 - 2009 XEON Processors.
The following are NOT optional.
64-bit Processor with Second Level Address Translation (SLAT).
CPU support for VM Monitor Mode Extension (VT-c on Intel CPU's).
Minimum of 4 GB memory. As virtual machines share memory with the Hyper-V host, you will need to provide enough memory to handle the expected virtual workload.
The following items will need to be enabled in the system BIOS:
Virtualization Technology - may have a different label depending on motherboard manufacturer.
Hardware Enforced Data Execution Prevention.
SLAT (Second Level Address Translation) is a feature of the CPU. It is called “Rapid Virtualization Indexing (RVI)”, and has been called Extended Page Tables (EPT) by Intel and Nested Page Tables (NPT) by AMD. You can use Wikipedia to look up Intel Nehalem and AMD NPT:
Every Core i3, i5 and i7 supports SLAT. You can look up the supported AMD versions at KB article on AMD
As of Sep 1, 2011 Mark Russinovich has updated (V3) his utility coreinfo.exe
that you can use to detect EPT and NPT (SLAT) support on your CPU. Use the coreinfo -v switch to list the features. An asterisk * next to a feature indicates that it is supported. A minus sign - indicates no support for that feature.
Here is an example of one that DOES NOT SUPPORT SLAT
Pshemas
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October 9th, 2017 06:00
thank you for such a long post - but you really didn't answer my question (is T7500 vt-d capable or not).
Any I don't know why you assumed I'm looking for a vm rack - I really don't. What I'm looking on is a way to launch VM's on my linux workstation, possibly with an ability to use gpu passthrough when I need to launch windows in vm (kvm) and set up a job for my 3d printer. VMs are not uncommon on regular desktops nowadays.
And to quote you:
"VT-d is more than just specs. The BIOS and chipset and processor must all support this. The 7500 is not a power edge rack server suitable for VMWARE ESX all versions."
Seriously? Guess why I'm asking ;) ... And note that in my initial post I've already checked whether chipset and processors are capable. Prefered to ask as I feared there might have been some BIOS lock up etc.
But to answer my question - it seems T7500 is vt-d capable. There are virtualization settings in the BIOS (including direct i/o) and I've managed to pass the gpu to virtual machine. I'm still getting some lock ups in it , but that's probably due to extra gpu I have which is non-uefi capable (and I still haven't figured out howto set passthrough on kvm/quemu when regular legacy bios is used).