Folding Forum

Is there a way to run a 4-core VM to run F@H?

Background:
I'm currently doing a feasbility study to update one of my fileservers and I need to use Solaris/ZFS in order to manage the proposed jump to 16 TB. (If I used my existing motherboard, and SATA RAID HBA (Adaptec 21610), it does NOT have LBA48 support, so the maximum array on-card is 2 TB (actually I lose a bit per array). If I replace the hardware, I will likely be getting a board (I think it was either a Gigabyte or a MSI board that I saw that had 14 SATA headers, and I'll get a cheapo SATA add-on card for 4 more ports, so it would support 16 (array) + 1 (OS).)

Anyways, because of that, I am trying to see if there's a VM that I will be able to use all 4 cores of the host system in order to run Linux and then subsequently the Linux SMP client.

So, if anybody knows of a VM that can run 4-cores, recommendations would be greatly recommended. Thanks.

The free version of VMWare is 2 cores only. If the software is purchased, it opens up to more cores, though I couldn't tell you how many in the latest version, but at least 4.

7im> do you have a product (and version) in mind ? I've never been able to find something that allows more than two core for the VM (I use VMWare Workstation 6.5) ...

I think you have to look at Solaris zones. In a "Virtual Box" you will see only one cpu core, VMware doesn't have products for Solaris:
http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/scla.jsp or http://opensolaris.org/os/community/brandz/

Apparently VMWare ESX server and Xen supports it, but I wonder how easy would it be to set up a guest to use more than one core.

I did read about Solaris Containers and I've briefly looked at BrandZ, but I wonder if F@H will be able to run in BrandZ.

*edit*
According to the link below, I don't think that BrandZ would work for running F@H.

http://opensolaris.org/os/community/bra ... erview.pdf

So that drops me back to either VMWare ESX Server or Xen.