I have this Mini-ITX PC that I have put together to use as a XBMC player and torrent downloader with very low power output (yeah well its no good for 1080p playback but our Samsung Led TV can handle most of those with its built-in player so thats no biggie either).

Anyway, despite the fact that the D525 or any Atom CPU as a matter of fact or really no good for virtualization (VT-x let alone VT-d etc. support) didn’t hinder me to go ahead and try some Qemu, OpenVSwitch and OpenFlow experimenting on it.

This page will get updated occasionally to give as much detail as possible about my progress.

Disclaimer: Please hereby be warned that I take no responsibility for any damage (software or hardware) taken by following instructions here blindly. Always have backups of your valuable data and take a cautions approach about environmental effects. Please also be warned that the D525 is and therefore should be an incredibly slow platform for virtualization.

Hardware:
Intel D525MW Mini-ITX MB
Atom D525 1.8Ghz Dual Core CPU
4GB DDR3 800MHz SoDimm RAM
500GB 2.5″ Seagate Momentus XT Hybrid Drive with 4GB SSD Adaptive Memory
DVD-RW Optical Drive
Akasa Crypto AK-ITX02BK Mini-ITX case

Software:
Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Precise Pangolin 64 Bit Edition on ZFS

Late and overdue Update:
I later got an Intel i7-3770 & 16GB system which completely took over my VM needs (with relative ease 🙂 )