ESX/ESXi and the AMD Phenom X4 9500

ESX/ESXi is a great way to truly utilize the powerful hardware that is available out there.  With the introduction of ESXi, VMware has ‘pulled a Microsoft’ by offering ESX for free to the masses in an attempt to anchor their stranglehold on the virtualization market.

ESXi 4, with VMware’s vSphere client, works on a broad range of hardware.  However, it was recently discovered in a testing environment with new hardware (an ASUS M2N68-VM and an AMD Phenom X4 9500) that AMD has a hardware bug in their Phenom X4 9×00 series of processors that breaks virtualization.  It took a lot of searching before this post was found on the VMware communities forum spelling out the issue.  Wikipedia also has a mention of it.  Unfortunately, this news isn’t easy to find.

The AMD Phenom X4 9×50 series of processors fixed the issue.