HVM Guest Support is Unavailable

Question

What does this error mean when I attempt to start a VM?

Error: HVM guest support is unavailable: is VT/AMD-V supported by your CPU

Environment

All OnApp versions

XEN HVs

Answer

This means that the Hypervisor needs to have virtualization support enabled in BIOS.

To check this, you can run this on the Hypervisor:

cat /sys/hypervisor/properties/capabilities

If HVM or SVM is not mentioned, then it is not enabled.

Here is an example of a HV with virtualization support enabled:

[ root@hv3 ~]# cat /sys/hypervisor/properties/capabilities
xen-3.0-x86_64 xen-3.0-x86_32p
hvm-3.0-x86_32 hvm-3.0-x86_32p
hvm-3.0-x86_64    

Here is an example of a HV without virtualization support enabled:

[ root@hv4 ~]# cat /sys/hypervisor/properties/capabilities
xen-3.0-x86_64
xen-3.0-x86_32p

Additional Info

Not all virtual machine templates will require HVM support.