Is there any virtualization software which can run x64 bit guest os without vt-x support Hardware?

Question

I have Gateway NE56R laptop with Intel B960 processor, which do not support virtualization. But I want to install x64 bit guest OS on VirtualBox, it gives me error. I have also used VMware workstation, Parallels workstation. My host OS is Ubuntu 12.10 x64 bit.

Please tell me, which virtual software I can use in this situation.

Answer 1

I did not test this, but qemu-system-x86_64, plain qemu without kvm does not use the processor's vt support. If it works, the performance might be a bit sluggish. Just boot some 64bit linux installation disk:

qemu-system-x86_64 -cdrom 64bitlinux.iso -boot d

Answer 2

There's no virtualization software that can run x86_64 guests without VT-x because because isolation of the virtual machine would be impossible without it¹.

However, there are a few solutions for you

Paravirtualization

This may provide even better performance than hardware-assisted virtualization because of the low overhead, but it needs a modified kernel so it'll only work if you use Linux guests (or other OSes with open-source and patchable kernels).

If that's your case then you can use Xen which can run 64-bit guests without needing VT-x

Emulation

Emulator softwares can run any guest architectures under any hosts. So you need an x86_64 emulator like qemu or Bochs. But be aware that it'll be much slower than other solutions

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¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86_virtualization#Software-based_virtualization

The initial version of x86-64 (AMD64) did not allow for a software-only full virtualization due to the lack of segmentation support in long mode, which made the protection of the hypervisor's memory impossible, in particular, the protection of the trap handler that runs in the guest kernel address space.

Revision D and later 64-bit AMD processors (as a rule of thumb, those manufactured in 90 nm or less) added basic support for segmentation in long mode, making it possible to run 64-bit guests in 64-bit hosts via binary translation. Intel did not add segmentation support to its x86-64 implementation (Intel 64), making 64-bit software-only virtualization impossible on Intel CPUs, but Intel VT-x support makes 64-bit hardware assisted virtualization possible on the Intel platform

Answer 3

For the record, VirtualBox does not support 64-bit guests on non VT-x hardware:

VirtualBox's 64-bit guest support [...] require[s] hardware virtualization to be enabled. VirtualBox Manual