Core 2 Duo Virtualization

Christmas and the new toys that come along with it are great. This year Santa was especially kind leaving a new Lenovo T60 below the tree, sporting the new Core 2 Duo processor (http://www.intel.com/products/processor/core2duo/specifications.htm). Anxious to try out the virtualization technology that I had read was built into the chip I was excited to find out that Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 (currently in beta) takes advantage the hardware enabled virtualization.

After I installed Virtual PC 2007 I was surprised to see that the hardware virtualization options were greyed out within VPC 2007. I rechecked the processor I had, and then rechecked the specs that mentioned the Core 2 Duo had virtualization.

I then rebooted the machine and checked the BIOS settings. It turns out that under the CPU settings "virtualization" was disabled If you have a processor that supports virtualization, but it does not seem to be enabled be sure to check the BIOS. Also, it appears from the Intel website that virtualization features of the processor are only available if the BIOS provides support for it.

I'll do some testing to see how much of a performance improvement can be gained from the hardware virtualization.