Saturday, June 14, 2008

Hyper-V on the Dell Optiplex

With the correct BIOS settings enabled on a E8500 processor (see http://processorfinder.intel.com/ for the processors that support EM64T, Virtualisation and Execute Disable which is needed for Hyper-V to work), and with them and the Trusted Execution property set to On in the BIOS I got the following errors with Hyper-V RC1 on Windows 2008 Enterprise Server RTM (running Server Core):

  • Hyper-V launch failed; Either VMX not present or not enabled in BIOS.
  • Hyper-V launch failed; at least one of the processors in the system does not appear to provide a virtualization platform supported by Hyper-V.

Fixed this by rebooting and pressing F2 to enter the BIOS and disabling the following settings

  • Security > Execute Disable (set to Off)
  • Performance > Virtualization (set to Off)
  • Performance > VT for Direct I/O Access (set to Off)
  • Performance > Trusted Execution (set to Off)

Press Esc and save settings. When the server reboots do a hard power off. Power on, and then in the BIOS again ensure that the following is set:

  • Security > Execute Disable (set to On)
  • Performance > Virtualization (set to On)
  • Performance > VT for Direct I/O Access (set to On)
  • Performance > Trusted Execution (set to Off)

Press Esc and save settings. Hard power off again once the server reboots. Turn power on and let computer boot normally.

At this point I got an Hyper-V error in that the entries in the event log above did not appear anymore, but were replaced by an error indicating that Hyper-V was not installed.

So I removed Hyper-V by running:

  • ocsetup Microsoft-Hyper-V /uninstall

and reboot.

Reinstall Hyper-V by downloading the latest build and install it using:

  • wusa

or if you have the latest build already installed, then reinstall using:

  • ocsetup Microsoft-Hyper-V