My conclusion is that either the requirements are wrong or the detection utilities are unreliable. And yet Hyper-V seems to be running just fine, thank you. The AMD Microsoft Compatibility Checker says “system is not compatible with Hyper-V” and CPU-Z and CrystalCPUID both fail to detect AMD-V. So I flashed an updated BIOS but still no joy. Lo and behold all the detection utilities I ran told me I was not running AMD-V and that the processor did not support virtualzation. Later, I learned about the utilities to detect and test processors for their ability to support hardware virtualization. Windows tools like AMD CPUInfo or Intel Processor Identification Utility (see Soft-Link) and the. Away I went into the virtualized world and after a little fiddling with Virtualization Manager, I had all the VMs I could handle. The Processor is a AMD Phenom II X6 1090T (Thuban). Not knowing all the nuances of virtualization terminolgy I happily purchased an AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core 5400 processor, dropped it into a PCCHIPS A13G+ mobo (not somethig I would do again) and installed the recently RTM’d Windows Server 2008 with the Hyper-V update. You know, it’s funny, earlier this year I built a new machine specifically to play with virtualization and Hyper-V in particular.

Amd processor identification utility