FT CPU requirements (Score 1)

I'm on the FT team at VMware and just wanted to provide some additional information on FT requirements. You can also find out more about FT at: http://www.vmware.com/products/fault-tolerance/

VMware collaborated with AMD and Intel in providing an efficient VMware Fault Tolerance (FT) capability on modern x86 processors. The collaboration required changes in both the performance counter architecture and virtualization hardware assists from processor vendors. These changes could only be included in recent processors from both vendors: 3rd-Generation AMD Opteron(tm) based on the AMD Barcelona, Budapest and Shanghai processor families; and Intel® Xeon® processors based on the Penryn and Nehalem microarchitectures and their successors.

The current set of VMware FT supported processors are:
Intel® Xeon® 3100 Series, Wolfdale (UP)
Intel® Xeon® 3300 Series, Yorkfield
Intel® Xeon® 5200 Series, Wolfdale (DP)
Intel® Xeon® 5400 Series, Harpertown
Intel® Xeon® 7400 Series, Dunnington
Intel® Xeon® 5500 Series, Nehalem
AMD Opteron(tm) 1300 Series, Budapest
AMD Opteron(tm) 2300 Series, Barcelona (65nm, DP) and Shanghai (45nm, DP)
AMD Opteron(tm) 8300 Series, Barcelona (65nm, MP) and Shanghai (45nm, MP)

VMware maintains a KnowledgeBase (KB) article that provides a current list of supported processors, see http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1008027.

You can download a utility, VMware SiteSurvey at http://www.vmware.com/download/shared_utilities.html to check if your configuration can run VMware FT.

While we understand the end user's desire to be able to use VMware FT on as many processors as possible, VMware's goal is to guarantee that Fault Tolerance works reliably.