Running Hyper-V on a laptop computer provides several advantages. You can use it for testing, training and development. But how do you know if Hyper-V will run on your laptop?

Hyper-V has several requirements. Key among them are:

• Windows Server 2008 Standard, Enterprise or Datacenter
• Only 64-bit versions of Windows Server 2008 support it
• Hardware assisted virtualization (Intel-VT or AMD-V)
• Hardware DEP

The difficulty is in determining if your system meets these last two requirements. The Intel-VT and AMD-V hardware virtualization features are enabled or disabled in a computer’s BIOS. Vendors use different names to refer to the hardware virtualization support as well as hardware DEP. Here’s a great tool that will take the guesswork out of the process for you:

http://www.grc.com/securable.htm

Securable is a simple and free utility that reports on whether your system supports the key requirements of Hyper-V (64-bit, hardware DEP and hardware virtualization support). When you run it, you will see a screen similar to the following:

If your screen shows 32 bits as the maximum length and no hardware DEP or virtualization, you cannot run Hyper-V. In fact, if just one of these three shows negative, you cannot run Hyper-V. Depending on the operating system, BIOS settings and the hardware, you may see messages that indicate that something is supported but not enabled. That’s not usually a problem – just turn it on in the BIOS.

When running Hyper-V on a laptop, I encourage you to have a laptop with at least 4 GB of RAM. With 4 GB of RAM you can potentially run to virtual machines at the same time. I am typing this blog on a laptop with 6 GB of RAM and it works great for Hyper-V testing and development – as well as training.

Hopefully, this will help get you started with Hyper-V on a laptop computer. Now days, a laptop isn’t so much different from a desktop – and that can be a really good thing for us IT geeks.