Greetings,
I am running a Dell Power Edge 2970 with two quad core Opteron 2.4 GHz model 2382 CPUs and 32 GB of RAM. The OS is CentOS 5.3, (Linux 2.6.18-128.e15). At present I have six Windows 2008 32 bit Standard Servers, one 2003 R2 32 bit Standard Server, and two XP Pro SP3's as VMware guest systems.
I have been trying for 2 weeks to install a 64 bit Windows Server (Standard, Enterprise, and R2 versions), as a guest system with very poor successs. The R2 versions will not even install, but no error messages occur, the install just hangs. The Standard and Enterprise versions will install, and run fine until I try to do anything with them, such as install a program, such as SQL Server. Once the program is installed the guest OS will either freeze or give the Blue Screen of Death. I can power the VM down, but if I try to open it again, the blue screen comes up as soon as it starts loading the Windows OS.
As these are my first attempts at loading a 64 bit OS as a VM guest I am assuming it may be an issue with the Host 64 bit OS, but no research indicates similar problems, so I started looking at the CPU and apparently there are some issues with AMD 64 bit CPU's. The VMware web site states that Opteron, revision E, or later, CPUs are supported, and this is where my quest fails. I cannot find out if the Opteron 2382 is a revisition E, or later.
Does anyone have a link that will definitively verify that the model 2382 is a revision E or later? If I can verify that, then I can move on to either obtaining different CPUs or I can narrow the issue to a software issue and work it from there.
Thanks for your time.