Network Plus Class Virtualization Issues – Solved

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Added by Mark Jacob April 27, 2015

If you are working at achieving a Network Plus career certification, you may be considering attending an Instructor Led Training (ILT) event.  If that is the case, you may be exploring more than one virtualization solution in order to build a practice environment.  This is appropriate considering that the labs in the class run inside a virtualized environment.  In this blog I will compare a couple of options and the impact the choice of one may have on the other.

Now I recently purchased a laptop and triple verified that it would support virtualization.  So I installed Oracle’s Virtual Box, imported a known working .ova virtual machine file, attempted to launch it, and got this message:

Since I was quite sure that my box supported Virtualization Technology, I decided to prove it to myself so I downloaded Intel’s chipset ID utility and ran it.  Here is what I saw:

There must be some mistake!  I verified in advance that my machine had the correct hardware support.  So I started digging.  It seems that if the box has Hyper V enabled, this could prevent VirtualBox from even seeing that the VT option was present.  So I went into Programs and Features, Turn Windows Features on or off, and unchecked Hyper V, which prompted me for a restart.  Once I was back in, I re-ran the Intel utility to see that it had changed:

Now that is what I was hoping to see.  So let’s try to launch one of the VirtualBox machines:

Success at last!  The lesson here is that even if your box supports Virtualization Technology (VT), if you have Hyper V enabled, other virtualization technologies won’t be able to access it.  So my solution is when I need Hyper V, I enable it.  If I am going to use another solution (such as Virtual Box) I disable Hyper V, reboot, and Voila! all is well

If you have any comments or suggestions, please feel free to drop me a line…

Mark Jacob
Cisco Instructor – Interface Technical Training
Phoenix, AZ