In order to install Hyper-V there are a few minimum system requirements that must be met. A few of these, such as the amount of memory required (1 GB) and the minimum amount of free disk space (10 GB) may be obvious considerations. However, did you know that your processor has several specific feature requirements other its speed?
In order to fully support Hyper-V, the processor(s) in your server must first and foremost be support 64-bit operation. Next, the processor must support hardware assisted virtualization which can be enabled in the BIOS of the system. If you aren’t sure whether or not your processor supports this you can check the manufacturers’ website. An Intel processor will be listed as supporting Intel VT where as an AMD processor will list supporting AMD Virtualization. Lastly, Data Execution Prevention (DEP) must be enabled in the BIOS. This is referred to as the Execute Disable (XD) bit when using an Intel processor and as the No Execute (NX) bit when using an AMD processor.
Most newly purchased servers support all of these processor requirements without having to specifically request virtualization-ready hardware. However, if you are going to be converting an existing server to a Hyper-V host then you should do your homework to ensure that the hardware supports all of the necessary functionality.
