As a virtual PC user, and in some cases now at work a VM Ware user, one of the options I’ve always wanted to leverage was acceleration for my virtual machines based on hardware virtualization.  It was something I always wanted while at Internowlogy but of course since I was using 3+ year old hardware, let’s face it the hardware didn’t support it, and odds are if you are using older hardware neither does yours. However, I’ve gotten new laptops since leaving Internowlogy 64-bit high end machines with lots of RAM.  Let me say up front since this post is obviously about how to enable this feature – my performance for my virtual Windows 7 hosting Visual Studio 2010 B1 has dramatically improved since enabling this feature (not to mention the performance of the virtual TFS server I set up here at Rubio’s.)

Originally I wondered if the problem was with the Vista OS so when I installed Windows 7 RC on one of my machines I was looking to leverage hardware virtualization – however, no change.  This became an issue because I wanted to take advantage of Windows 7’s ability to boot directly to VHD and thus set up a system with Windows Server 2007 R2 x64 RC – which isn’t supported by VPC.  Finally I found a little note that Dell doesn’t enable this CPU feature by default.

That’s right if you bought a new Dell you probably have a hardware virtualization capability for Virtual Machines that’s disabled.  To enable it you need to use F2 during startup to edit your BIOS settings.  Depending on which type of Dell you have you’ll either have 1 or 3 settings (based on my experience) related to hardware virtualization.  For those with slightly older PC’s will probably find just a single setting for hardware virtualization which is defaulted to [disabled].  Change this to [Enabled] and that’s it you are done.

Then there are those on the real cutting edge – like my Latitude e6500.  This brand spanking new system has 3 settings related to virtualization (actually closer to 4… but once I explain the potential issue you’ll see why I’ve ignored the 4th).  When you get to the BIOS for that machine there is a section on Virtualization Support.  Within this there are 3 settings: the first titled Virtualization should be enabled.  The second titled ‘VT for Direct I/O’ can also be safely.  However the third titled ‘Trusted Execution’ which deals with protecting information exchanged with the CPU – it’s an Intel ‘feature’.  For now enabling this setting reverses the previous two settings.  So if you are like me and your initial thought is ‘turn it all on’ then you will find that you still don’t have virtualization support, even if you carefully read the instructions under the trusted execution settings and find the TPM setting and enable it.  Don’t bother – it doesn’t help.

So to review: to take full advantage of your Dell’s virtualization capabilities use F2 during startup and go to the bios settings, enable virtualization support but do NOT use Trusted Execution.