Guest os supported on xen IA64
 

Hi frndz,
I'm running a Itanium(IA64) based server. I just want to know what kind of guest os (like x86,x64,etc.,) it will support if i'm building xen + rhel on Itanium.


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thanks a lot...
Hari.

I would think any OS supporting IA64 would work. I don't think an x86 OS would run as a guest that is running on top of non x86 hardware (in xen at least). The problem happens because the CPU isn't emulated in xen. When a guest is running, it runs ON the actual host CPU and must execute using the native instruction set of that CPU. So the guest OS would have to be compatible with the hardware the OS is on.

Not to worry however, because there are plenty of Linux distros that have pre-built installers for IA64. In fact, distrowatch has a way of searching for these distro's in its search page.

Good luck.