Hello,

I have a PowerEdge 840 on which I am looking to do a little Hyper-V work.  In preparation for this I’ve recently upgraded the CPU from the original Pentium D 3.0GHz (no Virtualization Technology support) to a Xeon x3210 which does support VT.  The new chip is installed and working fine.  Before the chip swap I updated the BIOS from A03 to the latest, A08.  When I go into the BIOS, I can find and enable VT, however there is no BIOS setting for XD (Execute Disable).  If I look at the CPU information under Dell OpenManage, it says the CPU is not XD capable and XD is not enabled.  I’ve tripled checked the BIOS settings and there is no XD enable setting.  Just for the heck of it I reflashed the A08 BIOS after the Xeon chip install – no change.

So, I’m puzzled –

I’ve seen Dell documentation that says the PE840 with Xeon processor supports Hyper-V.

I’ve seen Dell documentation that says PE840 BIOS version A02 and later support XD.

Intel clearly says the x3210 supports both VT and XD.

I’ve seen multiple accounts on the web of people running Hyper-V on Xeon equipped PE840s.

 

What am I missing? 

Does this version of BIOS bundle the XD setting within the VT setting? 

Is OpenManage lying? 

Is there a separate BIOS download for Xeon equipped PE840s?  (I pulled down the A08 BIOS associated with the Dell service tag which of course corresponds to a system originally equipped with the Pentium D).

I would greatly appreciate your input on this.

Thank You,