KVM on older hardware

I have an opportunity to grab a pair of AMD 16 core opteron 6386 SE processors for 27.00 each and a working motherboard for 130.00. Does anyone know if KVM will run on AMD hardware this old?

if it supports virtualization extensions (most amd products do as long as they aren’t ancient) then yes

if not, xen should do the trick

The CPUs do support AMD-v, and the motherboard should also support it. I do not know if they support NPT(Intel calls it EPT), that is something you would have to check, and I would be very surprised if they support AMD-vi.

So, takeaway, you should be able to run KVM, however it might be pretty slow due to not having NPT, and you are probably not going to be able to do PCI passthrough due to not having AMD-vi.

Also, even though it does have 32 cores total, each of those cores are VERY slow and VERY power hungry(for x86).

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the 6300 series opterons are bulldozer based, so I don’t see a reason it wouldn’t support pci Passthrough (bulldozer does)

@rdsii64 they’ll be slow but they should work fine

AMD-Vi is a chipset feature, not a processor feature, (brand name for IOMMU from what I can tell) but it’s supported in all chipsets designed for cpus newer than the K-10 uarch