Virtualize without VT-x
 

My computer's CPU doesn't support VT-x. Can I still run a virtual machine? If I can't, is there something I can buy that will allow me to virtualize.

T

You can still do full instruction emulation. Its just a lot slower than virtualization like KVM. QEMU calls this "User Mode Emulation".

See https://www.qemu.org/docs/master/user/index.html

Can I use virtualbox?

Looks like Oracle calls this "Software Virtualization"

https://docs.oracle.com/en/virtualiz...t-details.html

I guess we'd better ask a few questions to start. Exactly what processor do you have? The system model may help too. Ram amount? Just to mention an AMD is a different animal from Intel.


I used to run various VM programs on some very old computers in full emulation. It was all quite slow but that was usually on Windows hosts.

Options.

You can't usually get new processor I'd guess. The processor and the bios and the chipset are all needed to allow VM technologies.

You could usually run a usb flash/hard drive install.

You can dual boot.(not a newbie task)

You can get a computer that has enough resources for a VM.

You can use an older VM that is full emulation.

The benefit to hardware support is greater speed.

CPU: Intel(R) Pentium(R) CPU B960 @ 2.20GHz
Meminfo:
MemTotal: 6026184 kB
MemFree: 2906508 kB
MemAvailable: 4108496 kB


I am trying to learn more about networking, so I want to create multiple VM and play around with them. I can't get a new computer, and I need to VM.

6G should be enough to run if the VM is pretty lean. You probably want the VM to be in text mode, since a desktop on full emulation would be very slow.

Another possibility is to run containers. You can still have all the fun of a virtual network, bridges and ports in each container, without having to run 2 kernels in limited memory.

Not sure about current virtualbox but older versions could run in emulation mode. May have to uncheck vt-x checkbox on client build.

Emulation mode was dropped starting from VirtualBox 6.1.0 (Dec 2019):