Wednesday, June 17, 2009

ESX 4.0 in Workstation - requires Intel-VT

I have been running ESX 3.5 and ESX 4.0 in VMware Workstation 6.5.1 for a while on my Lenovo T61 from work without any problems. A prerequisite for doing this, at least for ESX 4.0 (an probably also for Hyper-V) as it runs 64-bit, is that the CPU supports virtualisation mode - which in the Intel terminology is called Intel-VT - an which has to be enabled in the BIOS. The T61 is about one year old and has Intel-VT, so I thought that it was standard on all newer Intel processors. But oh-no, this is not the case. I recently purchased a Dell Studio 17 for private use with a Intel Core Duo 2 T6400 processor and I thought that I was in the good house. But - no Intel-VT support. Everything else was in order, 4 GB of memory, Windows 7 64-bit and so on. This was a bit disappointing. If your're looking to buy a new laptop, then check that this feature comes with the CPU. I found an article on ZDnet which lists a number of processors and wheather they have Intel-VT enabled.

The following has been copied from the ZDnet article. YES means that the CPU type supports Intel-VT:


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