VirtualBox, Vagrant, and KVM

I was exploring the possibility of using Vagrant with VirtualBox for doing development on my local system.

The system is running Linux Mint 17, and I was using Vagrant 1.9.7 with VirtualBox 5.1.24.

I immediately starting having problems with some of the Vagrant boxes that I tried to run. (A "Vagrant box" is an initial machine image to be loaded into the virtual machine.)

For example, using the box hashicorp/precise64, the vagrant up command showed the error:

Stderr: VBoxManage: error: VT-x is not available (VERR_VMX_NO_VMX)
VBoxManage: error: Details: code NS_ERROR_FAILURE (0x80004005), component ConsoleWrap, interface IConsole

Later, after I had learned how to configure Vagrant to have VirtualBox display its own user window, I tried to run the box geerlingguy/ubuntu1604 and got this error from VirtualBox:

VT-x/AMD-V hardware acceleration is not available on your system. Your 64-bit guest will fail to detect a 64-bit CPU and will not be able to boot.

And on the command line, kvm-ok showed:

INFO: Your CPU does not support KVM extensions
KVM acceleration can NOT be used

It turns out that there are two possible explanations for these error messages.

(1)  The processor hardware does not have the capabilities required by VirtualBox to support Linux KVM (kernel-based virtual machines). These capabilities are either Intel's VT-x or AMD's AMD-V.

VT-x is sometimes encoded as vmx, and AMD-V is sometimes encoded as svm.

(2)  The processor hardware has the capabilities but they are not enabled.

Without this hardware, VirtualBox cannot run 64-bit operating systems. However, it can still run 32-bit operating systems.

In my case, it turned out that I have a lower-end processor that does not have the capabilities at all. I was able to check this by looking at the file /proc/cpuinfo to find the model number of the processor:

   model name : Intel(R) Pentium(R) CPU B960 @ 2.20GHz

Then using the model number B960 I searched this Intel site to find its specs.

If the processor has the capabilities but they are not enabled, then you might be able to enable them by going into the BIOS and looking for a setting such as VT (virtualization technology).

And for my next system, I will be looking for the processor to have this.

Sources:

ERROR: VT-X is not available
https://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=17090

PRODUCT SPECIFICATIONS
https://ark.intel.com/#@Processors

KVM/Installation
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/KVM/Installation

x86 virtualization
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86_virtualization