In an earlier post I noted I ran VirtualBox 6 on a CMP 5,1 running Monterey - installed using OCLP. See . The Windows 10 VM is installed on its own SSD.
Now several posts on this forum said VirtualBox 7 did not run on the CMP 5,1 (running MacOS?) because the "system" did not support the virtualisation instructions - particularly XSAVE. I experienced the same problem when I tried to run VBox 7 on Monterey - which is why I installed and successfully run VBox 6 on Monterey.
Now doing a bit of research I found suggestions of the following:
So I decided to install Linux (Ubuntu 22 in my case - but anything will do, I guess) on the CMP and try to install and run VirtualBox 7. Basically this works and I have booted the Windows 10 VM that I also run under Monterey / VirtualBox 6.
I have yet to see if the Windows 10 VM performs faster when running under Linux / VBox 7 compared against Monterey / VBox 6. I will run some Windows benchmarks - say Geekbench on the same VM running in both environments. The idea is to determine if the Linux / VBox 7 combination is exploiting some of the processor virtualisation support and whether that improve Windows 10 VM performance.
The only reason I am running Windows 10 is to run Quicken XG 2004.
So .... it seems that there may be life in the CMP 5,1 as a VM server if Linux is run as the host OS.
Now several posts on this forum said VirtualBox 7 did not run on the CMP 5,1 (running MacOS?) because the "system" did not support the virtualisation instructions - particularly XSAVE. I experienced the same problem when I tried to run VBox 7 on Monterey - which is why I installed and successfully run VBox 6 on Monterey.
Now doing a bit of research I found suggestions of the following:
- The CMP Xeon processors do support some level of virtualisation
- The Xeon virtualisation was "suppressed" by MacOS - preventing VBox 7 from running on the CMP 5,1
- Older PC BIOS sometimes requires virtualisation to be activated to run VM host software
So I decided to install Linux (Ubuntu 22 in my case - but anything will do, I guess) on the CMP and try to install and run VirtualBox 7. Basically this works and I have booted the Windows 10 VM that I also run under Monterey / VirtualBox 6.
I have yet to see if the Windows 10 VM performs faster when running under Linux / VBox 7 compared against Monterey / VBox 6. I will run some Windows benchmarks - say Geekbench on the same VM running in both environments. The idea is to determine if the Linux / VBox 7 combination is exploiting some of the processor virtualisation support and whether that improve Windows 10 VM performance.
The only reason I am running Windows 10 is to run Quicken XG 2004.
So .... it seems that there may be life in the CMP 5,1 as a VM server if Linux is run as the host OS.
