[Xen-users] cores-per-socket

[Gautam Saxena <gsaxena@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

We've been using Amazon EC2 a fair bit. We've discovered that to run a proprietary, commerical bioinformatics piece of software that is liscenced by physical SOCKET instead of cores, we needed to use a virtualization technology that converts multiple cores into a single socket. (This proprietary software will allow us to use up to 4 cores per physical socket, so that's what we want to map. We intend to buy a Dell server that has 4 physical CPUs with 12 cores apiece, for a total of 48 cores; we're hoping that XenServer will allow us to map this to instead 8 CPUs of 4 cores apiece. From what I understand, xcp supports this using the "cores-per-socket" parameter, right? 


However, for this guest OS, we need **Linux** on the guest OS, NOT Windows. Therefore, our questions are:

1) Is this "cores-per-socket" parameter a feature that ONLY works for HVM virtualization? Or will it work for paravirtualizations as well? If it works for paravirtualization, I assume that this is definitely the way to go, right?


2) If it only works for HVM virtualization, are there HVM templates for Linux, specifically Centos 64-bit, 5.x or 6.x? If not, are there any guidelines (ie wikis, websites, pdf etc.) on how to install Centos 64-bit (or similar Linux system) on an HVM machine using XenServer?


3) When using HVM, is the upper memory limit for the LINUX guest still 16 GB if using Centos 5.x? (Why is that?) If we were to use Centos 6.x on HVM, will it be 32 GB (per the docs)?

Thanks in advance.
Regards,


G
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