VirtualBox 64-bit guest support using an Intel Core 2 Duo processor

2d_62I was hoping that I would be able to use 64 bit Ubuntu and Centos as virtual machines in Sun’s free VirtualBox software on my desktop PC that has an Intel Core 2 Duo processor – after all it is 64 bit. But I’m only running 32 bit Vista.

This shouldn’t have been a problem with VirtualBox.

However, it turns out that a small selection of Core 2 Duo processors aren’t able to do this. The processor needs to have hardware virtualization support, which Intel has termed VT-x or ‘Intel Virtualization Technology’.

List of Core 2 Duo processors and support for VT-x

Anyway, I’m unlucky as the E4300 is one of the very few that don’t support this feature, so I can’t run the 64 bit versions.

3 Replies to “VirtualBox 64-bit guest support using an Intel Core 2 Duo processor”

  1. I have an Intel Core2Duo T7250 and the website you linked above doesn’t really go into detail on whether or not my processor has support for VT-x. Can you tell me if it has it? I keep getting an error in Virtual box saying that VT-x is enabled but “not operational.” I guess that probably means the T7250 doesn’t support it, right?

    Maybe you could just tell me how to look the support options up on the Intel website…i found my proc. there, but can’t tell whether or not it supports VT-x.

    Cheers,
    David

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