Can I run a Virtual Machine on an i7-3610QM or not?

Hey guys

I'm putting the last few touches on my Clevo W110ER order and there's one thing I really don't have clear right now: VT-x / VT-d support. I believe the i7-3720QM has it and the 3610 doesn't. How essential is it to run a VM or two? I'm not planning to do anything complex with it (e.g., Xen stuff), I just like to install a Linux VM to tinker around with as a hobby. My 3 year old Core 2 Duo E8400 lets me indulge that hobby, so I would assume the far superior 3610 shouldn't even sneeze, but the acronyms have got me confused

Halp?

Thanks!

 

VT-x is necessary to 64 bit Windows as a guest VM OS. It is not necessary to run 32bit Windows as a guest VM OS. I've run 32bit guest Windows OS vms using both MS Virtual PC and VMWare without VT-x without any issues, nor do I notice any performance difference. I've not ever tried run any linux vms on a non VT-x cpu.

VT-d is for directed I/O which is a fancy way of saying it allows you to assign a specific piece of hardware directly to the virtual machine. The most common use is to be able to use hard drive controller cards directly within a vm which is useful if the vm is a fileserver, for example. I've read that some have been able to use it to assign a graphics card directly to a vm which would drastically improve gpu performance within the vm which would be very useful if you want to game within a vm, but for the most part this is more miss than hit. If this ever becomes a sure thing then I will create a vm just to game in, assign my graphics card to the vm and use integrated graphics for my desktop.

I'm a sofware developer and do all my development within VMs and have yet to have a need for VT-d for development.

I'd think you'd have to be doing something very unique to be able to take advantage of VT-d on a laptop as I'm not sure what hardware you could or would assign to a vm, other than the obvious gpu scenario I mentioned above.

Hope that helps.

Edited to add: To answer your thread title, yes you can run a vm on i7-3610QM.

 

Ah right so I can ignore them both for my purposes. Thanks!

 

some of that sounds pretty cool. Are there any kinds of videos or classes or stuff you can do/ learn up on VM? It is a whole new beast to me. Never got into it since there are still other areas I am learning and I dont have time to read random things about it.

 

I'd say vm's definitely fall into the category of learning best by doing - just pick whatever operating system you would like to run in a virtual machine and then search running that OS within either virtual box or VMWare Player (both are free), pick your preference and then run with it.

If you are running an OS that requires licensing, such as MS Windows, you do have to account for that. For linux as a guest OS on VMWare you can download already built vm's so you just have to download the vm, install VMWare player and you are off and running, like here: http://virtual-machine.org/fedora-13-vmware-player-image-download

In most scenario's, using a vm beats the heck out of going dual boot. My wife as a dated digital camera with software that only works in XP and also has a sewing machine with software that also only works in XP - so she has an XP vm to use those items.

VMs are also good to try out trial software, maybe because you do not want to bloat your host OS with it, or maybe because you don't trust the source enough to install it on your host OS. Got some older games that will only run in XP or earlier, run it in a vm.