Intel VT

Hardware-Assisted Virtualization

Hardware-based Intel® Virtualization Technology (Intel® VT)¹ improves the fundamental flexibility and robustness of traditional software-based virtualization solutions by accelerating key functions of the virtualized platform, including:

• Speeding up the transfer of platform control between the guest operating systems (OSs) and the virtual machine manager (VMM)/hypervisor
• Enabling the VMM to uniquely assign I/O devices to guest OSs
• Optimizing the network for virtualization with adapter-based acceleration

Virtualization is used in data centers for disaster recovery, high availability, and business continuity, and in desktops to increase flexibility, improve security, and reduce costs.

Enabling KVM support on your hardware

The host machines must use either Intel VT or AMD-V chipsets that support hardware-assisted virtualization.

If Linux is already installed on your system, you can also determine if your system processor supports KVM by running the following command:

grep -E 'vmx|svm' /proc/cpuinfo

If this command returns output, then your system supports KVM. The vmx processor feature flag represents Intel VT chipset while the svm flag represents AMD-V. Note which KVM flag was returned as it will be useful for loading the correct module later.

Verify that the KVM-related feature is enabled in the BIOS. Complete the following steps to determine if the HS21 blade test machine running with an Intel Xeon chip has the KVM-related feature enabled:

1. Power off the machine completely.
2. Power on the machine and enter the BIOS by pressing the F1 key during boot.
3. In the BIOS menu, select Advanced Step → CPU Options.
4. Confirm that the Intel Virtualization Technology option is Enabled.
5. Save the setting and exit the BIOS.

Now your hardware is ready for deploying a KVM solution.