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My (Fortune 500) company just rolled out new VMs and everyone is complaining they are dog slow. Is there any way I could verify, from inside a VM, whether Intel virtualization (VT-x) acceleration has been properly enabled?

The processor claims to be a Xeon E7-2830 but the experience has been more like a first-gen Atom. I'd ask IT directly but I get the impression they're unlikely to respond to any suggestion that they are, in fact, drooling imbeciles.

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  • What sort of virtualization ? VMWare, Citrix/Xen, something else ? It may be necessary to instal 3rd party software and/or have admin rights in the VM in order to determine this.
    – Tonny
    Nov 6, 2013 at 14:50
  • VMware, sorry, guess I mentioned that only in the title. I don't have admin rights and IT almost never lets people request it.
    – user269950
    Nov 6, 2013 at 14:59

1 Answer 1

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Get the coreinfo utility from the sysinternals website.
It doesn't need admin-rights or a full installation.
You can run it directly from a Command Prompt Window.

Coreinfo -f shows the CPU features. The one you are looking for is called VMX. (It's almost at the top of the list.)

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  • Thanks for the tool. VMX is marked as not present (dash, not *). VME is marked *, though. Given that the E7-2830 does support VT-x, what does this imply? I'm thinking since VT-x doesn't (IIRC) support nested virtualization, it would make sense if it were disabled inside the VM even though it was being used...? (At least I seem to recall that was the case back when I used VMware Player and Virtualbox; it's been a while.) Though if it were disabled in the bios I would expect to see the same... right?
    – user269950
    Nov 6, 2013 at 20:59
  • To put it another way, it's not clear if I'm looking at a physical processor or a logical processor. The physical processor should have VT-x enabled, the virtualized processor probably not. Coreinfo -c says that the "Logical to Physical Processor Map" is * - Physical processor 0 ; - * Physical Processor 1. Which is not the most intuitive thing I've read today.
    – user269950
    Nov 6, 2013 at 21:07
  • I think you are right about the VMX/VME thing. That is at least as I always understood things. Logical to physical memory map has no real meaning as far as I know. Just has to do with in which order the (perceived) physical cores are mapped in ACPI tables and such. Has no meaning in a VM anyway as the hypervisor can spin that any which way it wants. (Especially on ESX with dynamic resource management.)
    – Tonny
    Nov 6, 2013 at 21:57

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