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Noah
angelbob
07 February 2008 @ 11:02 pm
Dell Service is okay by me  
While Dell service gets a bad rap for, among other things, outsourcing to India, I've had very good luck with them lately. Oddly, they seem to have matched up my (personal, private) purchase of a machine with my employer's name and have been treating me like a dignitary, but some of this seems to just be that they're better than advertised.

Anyway, while they haven't been able to help me with an admittedly obscure problem (*), they've certainly tried hard, and the problem is definitely not anything that the service organization is doing wrong -- it appears to be an engineering problem with the specific model of Dell that I purchased.

(*) I'm attempting to activate Intel Virtualization Technology in the BIOS in order to run software like KVM, Xen and VMWare. VMWare can run without it turned on, but runs much slower. The other two require it.
 
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( 8 comments — Leave a comment )
Sugar Hight0rque on February 8th, 2008 07:12 am (UTC)
Actually, in 95% of cases (or something like that), VMware will outperform KVM, Xen, and VMware WITH VT turned on without VT.

The least performant part of virtualiazation isn't really helped at all by VT. (namely, memory management.) The stuff VT can help is really not that slow using VMware's techniques up till now.
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Noahangelbob on February 8th, 2008 07:14 am (UTC)
Interesting. I'll have to give it a try, then. I've tried using QEMU (on which KVM is based), and it's pretty impressively slow, but I can believe that VMWare doesn't have the same problem...
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Sugar Hight0rque on February 8th, 2008 07:20 am (UTC)
Trust me. VMware (which, for full disclosure, is where I work) was doing the virtualization thing for ~8 years before VT. There are LOTS of optimizations you learn to make in 8 years.
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Zachzml on February 9th, 2008 07:50 am (UTC)
QEMU really is impressively slow. I tried it and quickly ditched it, mainly based on previous experience with VMWare.
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KJBcapnkjb on February 8th, 2008 08:36 am (UTC)
I'm glad Dell's been ok with you, every time we've called in at the office it's been almost as bad as trying to deal with SBC's people (if I never have to deal with another condescending know-nothing chauvanist bastard from Hyderabad who wastes two hours of our time and isn't actually able to solve a problem, I'll die happy).

But I could very easily go off for pages on telephone services that have been outsourced to India that I have to deal with on a daily basis at work, and that's not really the point of your post per se, so I'm gonna stop.
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Noahangelbob on February 8th, 2008 08:37 am (UTC)
I actually didn't talk to guys from India. Or if they were from India, they had *amazing* American accents.

This may be a change on Dell's part after bad press, or it may be because they seem randomly convinced that I'm a business customer.
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griffjongriffjon on February 8th, 2008 04:02 pm (UTC)
I have an Austin friend who's a Delly and a huge Xen fan; if you post your specific model info I'll link him to the page and see if he knows any tricks.
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Noahangelbob on February 8th, 2008 05:16 pm (UTC)
I've got a T3400 with a Conroe (Core 2 Duo) E4400 processor. The problem is just that virtualization isn't showing up as a BIOS option.
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