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Friday, February 8, 2013

Enable Intel-VT Option on a HP z420 Workstation

I recently was the receipient of a new workstation at work. It is a HP z420 Workstation that came stock with 8GB of RAM, a quad core Xeon E5-1620 CPU and a ATI Fire Pro 4900 GPU. It's fast, and the build quality is amazing. This system is an excellent starting point for anyone working with engineering and CAD software.

I need to run some virtual machines locally using VirtualBox as part of my IT admin / support engineer role and had some difficulty at first with the BIOS. I updated to the latest revision from HP, and could not find the location of the VT-x options. Not a very intuitive menu system and my lack of trying harder to find it resulted in coming across this article which pointed to the correct location. BIOS > Security > System Security > Virtualization. That's it. I was looking in all the wrong places because I wouldn't think to look in security options for VT options. It should have been it's own menu.

Here's the link that helped me figure this out:

http://h30499.www3.hp.com/t5/Workstations-z-series-xw-series/Enabling-hardware-assisted-virtualization-in-the-Z420-BIOS/td-p/5712989