[Users] Good enough for KVM but not for OpenVZ 7?

[Vasily Averin]

On 2017-11-11 09:34, Vasily Averin wrote:
> Dear Scott,
> 
> thank you for reporting this problem.
> 
> As far as I know Centos7 uses some old KVM version. 
> OpenVz7 includes newer version and probably can have some additional restrictions?
> 
> I've found that your Xeon E5530 was launched Q1'09 and related to Nehalem EP family
> https://ark.intel.com/products/37103/Intel-Xeon-Processor-E5530-8M-Cache-2_40-GHz-5_86-GTs-Intel-QPI
> 
> So looks like it can lack "Unrestricted guest" feature, however I do now know how important it is for KVM.
> I expect it should work but not so effective as newer CPUs.
> 
> I've requested comments of our KVM Team, hope they clarify the situation.

I got following feedback:
"It will work but is not officially supported neither by us nor by redhat. 
Installer warns (at least _SHOULD_ warn) but should not prevent the installation."

> On 2017-11-11 01:52, Scott Dowdle wrote:
>> Greetings,
>>
>> I have a Dell PowerEdge R710 rack mount server.  It is a few years old and it has an Intel Xeon E5530 @ 2.40GHz.  KVM likes it just fine and it passes a virt-host-validate with flying colors but OpenVZ 7's vmxcap says:
>>
>> Unrestricted guest    no
>>
>> Looking that up I find:
>>
>> "VMX Unrestricted Guest is an Intel microprocessor feature that is also called IA-32e mode. Running a VM in this mode requires minimal involvement from software. You can think of it as running a VM bare-metal with its own EPT.  This feature is available only on Westmere processors and later."
>>
>> I ended up installing CentOS 7 on it and KVM works fine.
>>
>> What's the deal? Why this extra restriction?  :(
>>
>> TYL,
>>