Читать книгу Windows Server 2022 & Powershell All-in-One For Dummies - Sara Perrott - Страница 50

The central processing unit (CPU) is the brains of the outfit. It processes instructions made by the program and/or applications. The CPU requirements for Windows Server 2022 are pretty easily met by most modern processors:

 1.4 GHz 64-bit processor: Considering that the operating system is an x64 system, it makes sense that the processor must also be an x64 processor. Even a cheap server with a lower-end processor should be able to meet the 1.4 GHz requirement with flying colors.

 Supports No Execute (NX): When the NX bit is enabled on certain areas of memory, the processor will not execute anything in that memory space, which can provide protection against malware. Areas protected by the NX bit usually contain things like processor instructions or data storage. Intel may refer to this technology as XD (short for Execute Disable), while AMD processors refer to it as Enhanced Virus Protection (EVP).

 Supports Data Execution Prevention (DEP): DEP provides additional protection against malware that may target memory locations.

 Supports CMPXCHG16b, LAHF/SAHF, and PrefetchW: These settings are specific to the processor, and there are multiple whitepapers published on the specifics. CMPXCHG16b is an instruction set supported by most modern x86_64 processors. Load AH from Flags (LAHF)/Store AH into Flags (SAHF) is needed to support virtualization. PrefetchW provides improvements to performance when using AMD processors. You don’t need to memorize these things — just know that these processor features can speed up execution of tasks and add some additional security features as well.

 Supports Second Level Address Translation (Extended Page Table [EPT] or Nested Page Table [NPT]): This feature is especially important if you’re planning on running Hyper-V. It improves the performance of the VMs on the system and takes some of the pressure off the hypervisor, which can, in turn, improve hypervisor performance.

You may be curious how you can tell if your CPU supports these requirements. Microsoft offers a tool that is part of the Sysinternals suite named Coreinfo; this tool tells you what your processor is capable of supporting. You can download Coreinfo for free from the Microsoft website (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/coreinfo). The file you download is a compressed zip file, so you need to extract it first. Then launch a command prompt to run the utility. To run Coreinfo, simply type coreinfo into the command window and you get a report of all available and unavailable features. Available features are marked with an asterisk (*), and unavailable features are marked with a hyphen (-), as shown in Figure 3-1.

FIGURE 3-1: Running the Coreinfo utility on a Windows system.