Strange behaviour of a Guest OS - x64

[waterboy_1980]

I have just built two VM's on our ESX Cluster, both are configured with dual-CPU and 8Gb RAM and installed with Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition x.64.

Our cluster infrastructure is all Intel (HP Blades) - mixture of dual and quad core CPU's.

When I have come to install applications on to the VM's they will not allow installation of Intel x64 apps, reporting the hardware is not correct. However, when trying the AMD x64 installers they work fine. Has anyone else seen this?

Another strange thing is that they are only reporting 7.75Gb of RAM when they are configured with 8Gb?

[peetz]

I think you are mixing the Intel ia64 (Itanium processor) architecture with the x64 (aka Intel EMT) architecture. The latter is often referred to as "AMD x64" - even if used on Intel processors -, because it was invented by AMD and later copied by Intel.

Both ia64 and x64 are 64bit, but are really different CPU types incompatible at the binary level, and there are different Windows 2003 editions available for ia64 and x64.

ESX does not support ia64, only x64, and obviously x64 is the architecture you are using.

According to Windows only using 7.75 of 8 GB RAM, this is something that you often see (also on physical servers). It has something to do with BIOS features or certain hardware using RAM in a way that makes it inaccessible for Windows.

With 32bit this can really be annoying. I have some DL360G5 running here that have 4 GB RAM built-in and Windows 2003 (32bit) can only use 3.35 GB.

\- Andreas