From last night I have been doing lot of planning to setup a virtual environment on my laptop.It was kind a little complex one as I will be dealing with 3 VM’s on the laptop.One has to be setup as a domain controller and a windows cluster has to be setup and install SQL 2012 on all the VMs and do some real test on Availability groups.

Yes,some real testing on Availability Groups !

After intense planning I decided to install the very first VM using Virtual Box (https://www.virtualbox.org/).I sized the VM pretty well giving 1GB memory,25GB HDD space and of course CPU.

I mounted the ISO of Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 and was ready to start the install process and suddenly an error came up

I was pretty sure that the laptop which I was using was having a 64bit architecture and it was a Intel core i7 processor.

What else could go wrong ?

There is one area you need to check first if you run into the similar issue,ie check if Virtualization Technology has been enabled in your BIOS.

Wow,cool isnt ?

Yes,this has to be checked out and Microsoft virtual PC has a pretty decent article which will help you to find where its available in BIOS for different laptop models.

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/virtual-pc/support/configure-bios.aspx

For my laptop this was indeed disabled by default.I enabled the same and was back to track.

I hope this quick post will help someone,some day.

Thanks for reading,and keep building virtual machines to test SQL 2012 !