[SOLVED] I have a virtualization question

kb2tfa · 10-21-2015, 12:40 PM

I have a Dell Vostro 200 desktop with Fedora 22. It's a rather old machine. It's 64 bit, however the processor does not support VT. If I install VirtualBox, it will only display 32 bit options, and installs of those are hit and miss.

I have a headless centos 7 that is my sandbox to play with, is there any way of running some sort of VT on that machine, to create an Ubuntu or CentOS instance?

I get no response when checking for vmx flags, but I do get this for svm

Code:

[root@headlesscentos7 ron]# cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep svm
flags	: fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush mmx fxsr sse sse2 syscall nx mmxext fxsr_opt rdtscp lm 3dnowext 3dnow rep_good nopl extd_apicid pni cx16 lahf_lm svm extapic cr8_legacy 3dnowprefetch lbrv

Would this be an OpenStack solution?
If I can't do it, it's not a deal breaker, just curious.

273 · 10-21-2015, 01:06 PM

Virtualisation is hardware technology, so your CPU either supports it or not, I'm afraid.

dyasny · 10-21-2015, 01:30 PM

Even if the CPU supports VT/AMD-V there's still vendors who block enabling those features in the BIOS. Sony are especially known for this sort of thing.

BTW, did you try to enable virtualization extensions in the BIOS?

kb2tfa · 10-21-2015, 01:44 PM

For the Desktop, I updated the bios, but after a post on this site, I found the cpu does not support VT. I'm not trying to get VT working on the desktop, that's not possible with the current hardware. What I would like to know is, can I setup any type of VT to use on my headless CentOS 7? The processor on my headless supports svm, so I'm assuming that it's VT compatible right? I see things like kvm. Would kvm be a solution? Basically I'm looking to see if I can setup virtualization on the headless centos not the desktop. I just provide the desktop info to show where I was coming from, but I now see the desktop info is really just confusing the issues. So forget I mentioned the desktop not supporting vt.

273 · 10-21-2015, 01:53 PM

Yes, as you see by the link I posted svm is the AMD equivalent so it should allow any virtual machine software to take advantage of that including things like running a 64 bit guest OS in VirtualBox (which, I think, requires a 64 bit host OS).
AS long as you don't want any kind of hardware acceleration* (such that it is in VMs anyhow) I think, judging by this, that you can use VirtualBox headless and connect to the client GUIs using RDP. Something I really must try when I get chance.
*Should have said "graphics acceleration" - other hardware may or may not provide acceleration.

kb2tfa · 10-21-2015, 03:10 PM

Thank you

dyasny · 10-21-2015, 03:11 PM

you can definitely use kvm with a CPU that supports nx and svm. however, you need to make sure AMD-V is enabled in BIOS, the cpuinfo output shows capabilities, not whether it is enabled

273 · 10-21-2015, 03:12 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by kb2tfa

Thank you

Thank you, you've reminded me to look into headless servers with VirtualBox again.

kb2tfa · 10-21-2015, 07:12 PM

I setup kvm, and it works.