How can I check whether Hardware Virtualization support is running for my virtual environment?

A. If your processor supports AMD-v or Intel-VT, hardware virtualization support is available with Windows 2003 R2 SP1 and Virtual PC 2007. For Virtual PC 2007, you can enable the support via the Options dialog box. If the option isn't available, the processor might not support hardware-assisted virtualization. Check the BIOS to see whether it's disabled. You can also check on a specific virtual machine (VM).

For Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1, you can enable hardware assistance for each VM by configuring the "Enable hardware-assisted virtualization if available" option on the Configuration page. To enable this support for all VMs, you can modify the options.xml file. Set the value of the key to true or false. For example, when support is turned on for all VMs, the key is set it to true as follows:

true

To confirm that a VM is running with hardware support, open the VM, start Performance Monitoring on the host OS (not the guest OS), and add the "HVM-VP is in HVM Mode" option from the Virtual Processors group. A value of 1 means hardware assistance is enabled, and a value of 0 means no hardware assistance.

In this figure, I have two virtual processors, one with hardware assistance enabled (which has a value of 1) and one without hardware assistance enabled (which has a value of 0).