February 6th, 2010 | 
Author: Virtualization Technology (VT) is a set of enhancements to CPU that improve performance for running a virtual machine by offloading some of the work to the new cpu extensions. Both AMD and Intel have CPU that support this technology.
In some cases it will be very usefule to know if your system can handle it.
It will be very simple from a Linux system because you should only take a look to /proc/cpuino looking for one of the following value :
- vmx – (intel)
- svm – (amd)
You can use grep to quickly find if either value exists in the file by running the following command:
egrep ‘(vmx|svm)’ /proc/cpuinfo
If your system supports VT, then you’ll see vmx or svm in the list of flags.
My system has four quad core AMD processors, so I’ll find the following repeated from 16 times :
My system has two processors, so there are two separate sections:
flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush mmx fxsr sse sse2 ht syscall mmxext fxsr_opt pdpe1gb rdtscp lm 3dnowext 3dnow constant_tsc rep_good nopl pni monitor cx16 popcnt lahf_lm cmp_legacy svm extapic cr8_legacy abm sse4a misalignsse 3dnowprefetch osvw ibs skinit wdt
VT technology can still be disabled in your computer’s BIOS, however, so you’ll want to check there to make sure that it hasn’t been disabled. The flags in cpuinfo simply mean that your processor supports it.
VT is required to run 64-bit guests using Hypervisor like VMware Server or others similar products.
Hope this help
Bye
Riccardo
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