tandonhat wrote:
Yes, notoriously wrong indeed.
In my case, I have a Xeon X3220, which they clearly indicate to support both VT-x and EPT (http://ark.intel.com/products/28034/Intel-Xeon-Processor-X3220-8M-Cache-2_40-GHz-1066-MHz-FSB), but when I install ESXi 5, the message "Virtualized Intel VT-x/EPT is not supported on this platform" still appears. I take that as the X3220 does not support EPT? (Although it may support VT-x as according to the CPUZ readings)
The Xeon X3220 does not support EPT. It was released well before EPT was available.
So is there any official confirmation about this? And is there any workaround for me to install ESXi on a Workstaion 9?
There is no official confirmation, but you can either read the MSRs yourself or trust the dump of the MSRs in the vmware.log file, where they are decoded for human readability. You are looking for the line that says:
Enable EPT { 0 }
or
Enable EPT {0,1}
The latter implies EPT support; the former does not.
You can still install ESXi under Workstation 9, but you will only be able to run 32-bit nested VMs using binary translation.