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May 2nd, 2012 13:00
PowerEdge 840 Virtualization Woes....
OK - I picked up a Poweredge 840 for personal use (home lab, directory, sandbox, etc...). This was originally a Pentium D host but has been upgraded to a 3000 series Xeon (SL96E / 5030). According to Intel ( http://www.intel.com/Assets/en_US/PDF/specupdate/313065.pdf and http://ark.intel.com/products/27208/Intel-Xeon-Processor-5030-(4M-Cache-2_66-GHz-667-MHz-FSB) ) this processor supports virtualization. I am running Centos 6.2 and the host OS is up and stable. Virtualbox is installed and will allow the creation of a baseline VM - but when launching the VM I get the following error message:
Failed to open a session for the virtual machine Home-DC.
VT-x is not available. (VERR_VMX_NO_VMX).
I've been digging through the forums here and elsewhere and have found some good information indicating that virtualization on the PowerEdge 840 is possible - but I have not been able to get this working.
Dell documentation states that the 840 with Xeon processors support this functionality (page 12 of http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/software/HyperV/en/sov/sova00.pdf )
The common thread that I find as I research is that I need to turn on hardware virtuialization in the system BIOS. In short - I have looked through every single configurable item in bios and I don't find any reference to this. BIOS was A01 when I got the machine - has been updated to A08. I have rebooted a number of times, validated that A08 is in place, but I never find this option.
In this thread: http://en.community.dell.com/support-forums/servers/f/956/t/19438390.aspx I find a user with a very similar configuration who sees success after rebuilding the machine. I am trying very hard to avoid a rebuild.
Any thoughts?
DELL-Chris H
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May 2nd, 2012 14:00
Nhmiller,
The PE840 doesn't support virtualization at the BIOS level. It doesn't have the ability to enable Virtualization Technologies. It is the 9th generation servers that started to support virtualization.
Dev Mgr
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May 3rd, 2012 07:00
The Dell PDF that nhmiller linked specifically says that the PowerEdge 840 does support hyper-v (and therefor Virtualization Technology. So per that document it does have the ability to enable VT.
As for a rebuild, one option is just to shut down, pull the current drive(s) and put in a blank drive and do a fresh install to see if that then works. If so, you know you'll probably have to reinstall, but if it still doesn't work, you can switch back to the original drive(s) and look into your options.