[geeks] [UPDATE] VMware and VALinux 2240

[Lionel Peterson]

>From: Ido Dubrawsky <idubraws at dubrawsky.org>
>Date: 2008/04/07 Mon PM 04:43:17 CDT
>To: geeks at sunhelp.org
>Subject: [geeks] [UPDATE] VMware and VALinux 2240

>I finally got a chance to play around and watch the machine while I 
>started VMware.  It looks like this is NOT a memory or a disk access 
>issue but rather an ACPI issue.  When I started one of the virtual 
>machines as it was booting the machine just shut off completely.  
>Looking through the logs after it booted I noticed that there were 
>complaints about a non-ACPI compliant BIOS (the motherboard is an Intel 
>440GX+ board and has a history of having a very buggy BIOS).  My 
>suspicion is that the VMware software is trying to boot the system and 
>diddles the BIOS in some way and makes the system completely unstable -- 
>or it's just instability in general due to the buggy ACPI.  INow when I 
>start a virtual machine it just crashes.  Looks like I'm going to have 
>to either migrate my virtual images to another machine (which I'll have 
>to build or buy and then figure out what I'm going to do with this one) 
>or try another virtual hosting software.  Unfortunately VMware has the 
>widest support for operating systems.  Bummer -- I was hoping it would 
>be easier to fix than this.

Ido,

I have some odd bits that might help. I have some systems that are dual P3 Xeon 1.0 GHz with Intel SBT2 motherboard. They are SCSI-based machines, and include a five tray "hot-swap" cage and redundant power supplies. They are also huge, in a "slightly smaller than an E250" kind of way. They take PC133 Registered RAM and have 4x 256 Meg DIMMs installed in the four memory slots - I think 4 Gigs are possible on the MB.[0]

I also have some Supermicro MBs with dual PIII 500 MHz CPUs on-board, model P6DBE that are AT/ATX size (not over-size).[1]

Either could be made available to you to further your efforts, though the Intel MBs are EATX and are built for the chassis they are in. They *can* be shipped, but delivery/pick-up would normally be the suggestion...

The Intel systems are pretty nice, and the Supermicro boards can take up to two 1 GHz CPUs as I understand it.

If you (or anyone on the list) are intersted, please don't hesitate to contact me directly.

Lionel

[0] ftp://download.intel.com/support/motherboards/server/sbt2/sbt2_tps.pdf

[1] http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/archive/PentiumIII/440BX/P6DBE.cfm