A few days ago, I was setting up virtual machines on one of my lab servers and I ran into this interesting error.

It’s a Windows Server 2008 R2

 "virtual machine could not start because the hypervisor is not running".

This is a Dell PowerEdge T610 and I’m trying to build multiple virtual machines using Hyper-V tools natively available from within Windows Server 2008 R2. The error message is a bit nebulous. It seems like there is a hypervisor service that needs to be started. But that’s not it.

As soon as I saw that message, I realized that when I built this machine, I made sure to ‘Disable’ the ‘Virtualization Technology’ setting in BIOS for processors. Now its coming back to bite me !! So, shutdown the machine; Powered it back up; Went to BIOS settings; In there, it has a setting for ‘Virtualization Technology’ under processor settings. Enabled this setting and brought the machine back up. Voila !! now the virtual machines are running fine.

For other hardware machines (HP, etc), the setting could be something different. But once you go into BIOS you can easily figure it out.

Some more help if anyone is interested.

• Article from Microsoft Support
• Post on Dell Website
• Technical Guide for PowerEdge T610

Hope this helps,

_Sqltimes