Find out whether your own machine can virtualise, and fix it if not

short · 35 min · Objective 4.1

Task

Establish whether hardware virtualisation support is present and enabled on your machine, enable it if it is not, and record the before and after -- because a disabled firmware setting accounts for a large share of the support calls in this objective.

Steps

  1. Record what the operating system reports about virtualisation support in lab/virt/os-report.txt -- the system information panel, or the processor flags on a Unix-like system. On Windows, if systeminfo says "A hypervisor has been detected", virtualisation is not off: it is ON and IN USE -- Hyper-V, WSL 2 or virtualisation-based security is running, and Windows now sits on top of it as a guest. From there the processor's own flag reads as off (on one such machine Win32_Processor.VirtualizationFirmwareEnabled returned False while Win32_ComputerSystem.HypervisorPresent returned True). Record both, and do not go into the firmware to enable something already working.
  2. Record the processor's published virtualisation features in lab/virt/cpu.csv with header feature,supported,source, covering the base extension and the directed I/O extension.
  3. Enter the firmware and record the current state of every virtualisation-related setting in lab/virt/firmware-before.csv with header setting,value.
  4. Where it is disabled, enable it, restart, and record the new state in lab/virt/firmware-after.csv with the same header, plus a line in lab/virt/changed.md naming what was changed and what it was before.
  5. Write lab/virt/symptoms.md listing four symptoms a machine shows when this setting is off, including the one about guest architecture.

Verify

These checks run in a POSIX shell: Terminal on macOS or Linux, and on Windows Git Bash (it comes with Git for Windows) or WSL. A stock Windows PowerShell or Command Prompt has no awk or grep, so there the first line fails.

grep -c . lab/virt/os-report.txt
awk -F, 'NR>1 && NF>=3 {n++} END {print n" feature(s)"}' lab/virt/cpu.csv
awk -F, 'NR>1 && NF>=2 {n++} END {print n" firmware setting(s) before"}' lab/virt/firmware-before.csv
ls lab/virt/firmware-after.csv lab/virt/changed.md 2>/dev/null | wc -l
grep -c . lab/virt/symptoms.md

An operating system report, two or more processor features sourced, the firmware state recorded, and four symptoms. Where the setting was already enabled, the after-file and changed note may be absent and the count of two drops to zero -- record that in symptoms.md so the absence is deliberate rather than an omission.

Notes

The 32-bit-guests-only symptom is the one worth remembering. A hypervisor that offers no 64-bit guest options is not limited software; it is a firmware setting one restart away.

This is an independent study companion for CompTIA A+ Core 1 220-1201 and is not produced by or endorsed by CompTIA.