Enabling Intel VT for Hardware Virtualisation

I use VMWare Server quite a lot at work for testing and evaluating operating systems and things, and this does a really good job of allowing me to take my work with me to any machine and just running the VM to get going.

I've been experiencing something strange recently, every now and again when I move a VM from our works laptop (Dell Vostro 1500, Intel Core 2 Duo, 2gb RAM etc) to my desktop VMWare kept giving me a "VT is Available but not Enabled" message, which was funny since my desktop (again a Dell Vostro 200, Intel Core 2 Duo, 4gb RAM) clearly had "Virtualization Technology (VT)" set to "Enabled" in the BIOS. I'd even upgraded to the latest BIOS version from the Dell website to make sure there were not problems there.

Since Intel VT Virtualization Technology is supposed to be real good for helping improve the speed of virtualised systems and the only way to run a 64bit guest under VMWare Server, this morning I decided to have a go at fixing this and I managed to solve the problem.

It turns out that in order to enable VT technology on my Dell Vostro 200 desktop I needed to not just reboot the pc, not just power off the pc, but to unplug the power cord completely and allow the PC to go cold!

There is some kind of residual power consumption that means that changing the setting in the BIOS and rebooting is not sufficient to actually change the setting on the CPU! This even persists through a BIOS upgrade!

Let me know if this information is helpful to anyone :)

EDIT: 23/Jan/2008 - It would appear the setting didn't persist or something since I'm still finding the same problem again! Grrrr... If anyone from Dell knows how to fix this PLEASE get in touch!

EDIT2: 08/May/2008 - It seems Dell have fixed the problem in the latest 1.0.13 BIOS revision, available from the Dell support site.

Submitted by Chris Bray on Fri, 12/21/2007 - 10:02.
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