Hello World,

This is also a quite frequent question we are receiving.  Is there an easy way to check if a computer support 64-bit operating system and if virtualization technology can be used ?  Luckily, yes, there are some tools that allow you to check these kind of information.

With the new iteration of the Virtual PC  (Windows XP mode), Microsoft has released a tiny tool that will check your systems characteristics and notify you if you can run or not not Virtualization software on the computer. the tool is called havdetectiontool and can be downloaded here.

The tool will simply check if your system has or hasn’t the Hardware-Assisted Virtualization feature. (On the screenshot, you can see that my computer has not this HAV feature available)

A better tool (still running within Windows Operating system) is available and called Securable. The tool can be downloaded here.  I prefer this tool can it provide a little bit more information and it tell you if the virtualization feature is enabled or disabled within the BIOS.

Another tool that can be used to chec the HAV setting is the CPU-Z utility but it’s a little bit more complex to use. You need to identify the revision level of the CPU. I’m not using this tool anymore (for this purpose i mean)

All tools are self-executable. there is not installation routine needed.

If you have a Linux machine and you want to know if you can run Virtualized software (such as KVM), you can use the built-in tools of Linux.   You type from a Terminal window the following command

egrep ‘(vmx|svm)’ –color=always /proc/cpuinfo

If nothing is displayed after this command, you CPU probably does not support Hardware Assisted virtualization feature. if  the command output some information on the screen, you can assume that the machine will be able to run virtualization software

Till next time see you