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Tips and tricks: Do all certified systems support full virtualization in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5?

by the editorial team

No, hardware must meet certain requirements to support full virtualization in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5. For x86_64-based systems, the processor must support Intel VT-x or AMD-V technology. For Itanium2-based systems, the system must use a Montecito (or newer) processor.

In addition to CPU support, the system BIOS must also support full virtualization. Please contact the system vendor to determine if the BIOS supports full virtualization.

(Note that if this Knowledgebase article was linked from a system listing on the Red Hat Hardware Catalog, the system in question does not support full virtualization.)

Red Hat’s customer service and support teams receive technical support questions from users all over the world. Red Hat technicians add the questions and answers to Red Hat Knowledgebase on a daily basis. Access to Red Hat Knowledgebase is free. Red Hat Magazine offers a preview into the Red Hat Knowledgebase by highlighting some of the most recent entries. The information provided in this article is for your information only. The origin of this information may be internal or external to Red Hat. While Red Hat attempts to verify the validity of this information before it is posted, Red Hat makes no express or implied claims to its validity.

One response to “Tips and tricks: Do all certified systems support full virtualization in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5?”

  1. Jack Smith says:

    Hmmm, ‘full virtualization’ - what’s that ?
    Is it ‘Emulation or simulation’ (e.g. QEMU); ‘Hardware enabled virtualization’ (e.g. XEN), or perhaps ‘Native virtualization’ and full virtualization (e.g. VMWare Server/workstation); but surely not ‘Application Virtualization ‘ (e.g. Java) - let’s not go any further, there are at least another handfull of other ‘types’ of virtualization.

    It’s not even enough to specify that the hardware must support the virtualization type. Two types of CPU support are quite common - both supported by several different classes of Intel and AMD CPUs - (see PAE and VMX in CPU SVM flags) but will provide very different capabilities.

    Furthermore -aside from BIOS support- memory architecture can also make a difference.

    Sorry, this little article is so devoid of information as to be almost totally useless. You might as well have answered ‘No’ and been done with it.

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