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AMD machines and XEN - certifications (HP)

Former Member
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I just found a new version of note 171371 - which lists the following server as "certified":

4 Socket ProLiant Servers
ProLiant DL580 G5 - VMware 3, Xen 3
ProLiant DL585 G5 - VMware 3
ProLiant ML570 G4 - VMware 3, Xen 3

8 Socket ProLiant Servers
ProLiant DL785 G5

(for those who don't know the names: machines with a "5" at the end are AMD processor machines)

Is there any special (technical?) reason, why AMD machines are not certified for Xen? I know, there are some "specialities" because of HyperTransport and NUMA... is that the reason?

Markus

Accepted Solutions (1)

Accepted Solutions (1)

hannes_kuehnemund
Active Contributor
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Hi Markus,

the SAP on Linux (on a hypervisor) certification in the SAP LinuxLab is done via Virtualization Certification Workshops. In these joint SAP LinuxLab certification workshops we bring all SAP partners together to certify a variety of software and hardware stacks. Having all SAP LinuxLab partners participating in these workshops normally guarantees a very good test coverage. However, in the past certification workshops we did not have AMD CPU based machines for certification available. Therefore, AMD CPUs are currently not certified for SAP on Xen, which is very sad imho.

Until now, for me it looks like that there hasn't been any big customer inquiry to certify the AMD CPUs for Xen. If there have been such inquiries, either the hardware partners didn't react or the hardware vendor might told the customers to use Intel based CPUs. FYI, the ProLiant DL585 G5 certification on VMware ESX 3 wasn't part of the certification workshop. I suppose that this certification was done by HP themselves w/o direct involvement of SAP. So maybe you could contact the HP colleagues at SAP (e.g. via OSS call on BC-OP-LNX-HP) and ask for Xen certification on these machines.

If you ask me, i strongly think that the above mentioned combination (Xen on AMD) performs well, but as its not tested, we cannot give any support statement.

Thanks,

Hannes

markus_doehr2
Active Contributor
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Hello Hannes,

thank you for the clarification.

In fact, we run those boxes (DL385/DL585) with SLES 10 Xen - as of now successfully without any OS specific issues.

If one installs (unsupportedly) a Windows instance into a DomU using Microsoft SQL Server there are problems with timer synchronization which I don't see on an identical Xeon based Xen DomU (with Windows). Since I can't install processor drivers on a DomU for the high resolution timer I get I/O times for a single I/O up to 25 seconds (on Windows).

A Linux based DomU shows the identical performance as on a Xeon or bare metal - I don't see any drawbacks here. I was just thinking that the "NUMA-thing" has something to do with that (I read a few posts on the Xen development list) but apparently it's just a certification thing.

I'll open a call and see what HP will tell me

Markus

Answers (0)