AMD

Its a long shot that many people will have this issue but hey why not!

If you have one of the uber new AMD FX Processors (e.g. the 6 core 6100BE) and have tried to run a Windows Server 2008 R2 virtual machine on it you may have seen this error message.

An error occurred while attempting to start the selected virtual machine(s).

‘<VM name>’ could not initialize.

The virtual machine could not be started because the hypervisor is not running.

The cause of this issue is well documented in Microsoft KB 2568088 (link), the short version is the newer AMD CPUs have a feature called AVX included that Hyper-V does not like very much.

As such you can sort this issue out by running the command bcdedit /set xsavedisable 1 at a elevated command prompt.

Just make sure you restart your PC after and boom you will be able to run your virtual machines again!

Before I go much further into this article I will say – there is no one answer to how much power does a PC consume. You have to take into consideration the internal components (particularly the CPU and if the PC uses a HDD or SSD), the age of the PC, the efficacy of its PSU and also how far its components are pushed.

The simplest way to determine how much power your PC uses is to buy yourself a relatively cheap power meter like this one on Amazon which I got for a little under £10.

All the same the video below shows a selection of the various types of PCs I have to hand and how much they consume, a further write up is over the page.

 

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Buying powerful PCs pre built is all so well and good but the fun comes in when you build them yourself!

That’s just what we have done at work with some media suite PCs which use 6 core processors, modular PSUs and all other kinds of fun things – full specs and photos to come after the video.

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For the past few months we’ve had a donated storage server sitting in our storage room, with 8x1TB HDDs it was the perfect chance for us to supplement our daily tape backups with the speed of hard drives and move tape to monthly.

The only issue was that the server came with a rather pants Intel Core2Duo processor that didn’t even support 64bit! As such we couldn’t load our OS and Backup Software of choice (Server 2008 R2 and System Centre DPM 2012).

After a few months of waiting for budgets now we have been able to spend the £280 that it took to get some proper components into this server and the photos of it are below, full spec list is on the next page.

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A press release today from AMD (AMD Launches New Platform for Dedicated Web Hosting Providers) seems all too convenient after AMDs recent purchase of SeaMicro.

The basics of it all goes that AMD now has a server class processor with a low power consumption, high core count that fits in a desktop class motherboard all of which is perfect for so called ‘cloud’ computing – specifically in the area of web hosting which requires ultra high density processing (fitting as many processors in a small amount of space).
For a little while now one of the key players in this arena has been SeaMicro with its Intel Atom powered (yes the same kind of processor that you might find it a netbook).
Of course now that SeaMicro is part of AMD it wouldn’t be seemly for them to continue to use Intel processors (AMDs rival) – thus AMD steps in with the 3200 series.

Its all just a little observation but I wouldn’t mind betting AMD has pushed this processor through the RnD guys fast to get it on the shelves and used in their new SeaMicro servers.

From a different perspective with its desktop style AM3+ socket I could certainly see this CPU coming in use with projects such as my recent storage server construction where a high volume of storage (and not processing power) is required but not that it wouldn’t be nice to have a decent low power server class CPU ticking the whole thing over.

I am a self admitted strong fan of HP server hardware and in this video I’ll give you a tour around one of our servers at work.

There is one little error in the video about ‘common slot power supplies’ – although the DL165 G7 is a great bit of kit the power supply isn’t of the new HP common design and so can’t be changed with ones from more advanced servers (e.g. the DL385 g7).

For more information on the HP DL165 G7 server visit the HP website using this link.

This is old news really but either way HP have updated a number of server models to include the new AMD Opteron 62xx processor series.
The beefiest of all being the Opteron 6282SE which comes with 16 cores each packing 2.6ghz of clock speed. Naturally this kind of speed comes at a high TDP (in this case 140W) especially when compared to the highly conservative Opteron 6128HE (8 core 2.0ghz) which chews through a TDP of just 85W. Continue reading