Hyper-V: List of SLAT-Capable CPUs for Hosts

HyperV

With the announcement that you can run Hyper-V on the Windows 8 client. I have had a lot of  questions regarding this? I did do a post back in August explaining the process of checking your PC estate for SLAT Support see https://blogs.msdn.com/b/uk_faculty_connection/archive/2012/08/31/if-your-thinking-of-installing-windows-8-are-your-labs-machine-capable.aspx

A number of people have reported simple having problems running Hyper-V on  a Windows 8 client as it requires SLAT to run Hyper-V.

Running Hyper-V on Windows Server 2012 does *not* require SLAT but most institutions don't want to install a server OS as a desktop operating system.  SLAT is a feature of the CPU. It is called “Rapid Virtualization Indexing (RVI)”, and has been called Extended Page Tables (EPT) by Intel and Nested Page Tables (NPT) by AMD.

You can use Wikipedia to  look up Intel Nehalem and AMD NPT:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Nehalem

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD-V_Nested_Paging

Processors that support SLAT

  • Intel processors whose names start with 'i', e.g. i3, i5, i7, i9. (There may be exceptions, but I'm not aware of any.)
  • Any Intel CPUs based on Nehalem, Westmere, or Sandybridge micro-architectures. (There may be exceptions, but I'm not aware of any.)

For AMD machines you can look up the supported models at https://support.amd.com/us/kbarticles/Pages/GPU120AMDRVICPUsHyperVWin8.aspx

Tools for testing for SLAT

Microsoft’s Mark Russinovich has also created a really nice utility coreinfo.exe  You can simply run coreinfo.ext and it will  detect EPT and NPT (SLAT) support on your CPU. 

To test your machine, simply download coreinfo.exe from Microsoft Sysinternals https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/cc835722  and use the coreinfo -v switch to list the features. An asterisk * next to a feature indicates that it is supported. A minus sign - indicates no support for that feature.

Note: Coreinfo must be executed on a system without a hypervisor running for accurate results and under a administrator account on Windows 8.

For example here is a screenshot from my Lenovo X200 series tablet

coreinfo

“*” means the feature is present   

“-“ means it is missing

Alternatively, you can use Windows PowerShell to capture your specific CPU model this could be scripted to report the state of your entire PC labs or cluster estate the PowerShell command is gwmi win32_processor

 

Powershell

 

NOTE: Be sure to include the specific family/model/stepping since different processor revisions may have different feature sets.