Q. If I want to boot from a Virtual Hard Disk (VHD), does my processor have to support virtualization?

John Savill

January 13, 2011

1 Min Read
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A. Boot from VHD (or VHD with Native Boot) is a new feature of Windows 7 (Enterprise and Ultimate editions) and Windows Server 2008 R2 that allows a physical machine to boot from an OS stored inside a VHD. Although it might seem like virtualization is used, you're not actually performing machine virtualization (where the OS is abstracted from the physical hardware). You typically only need processor virtualization support (Intel VT or AMD-V) for machine virtualization. All you're doing with boot from VHD is using file system virtualization capabilities, which means your processor doesn't have to support virtualization to use boot from VHD.

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