Priya Nandakumar

Virtualization is disabled in BIOS because manufacturers ship the CPU’s virtualization extensions switched off. Intel calls it VT-x, AMD calls it AMD-V or SVM Mode, and the same feature has a different menu name on every motherboard. Turning it on takes about five minutes in firmware, and this guide covers why virtualization is disabled in … Read more

If you run guest operating systems on your own machine for development work, VMware Workstation Pro is usually the faster of the two, and since November 2024 it has been free for personal and commercial use. Oracle VirtualBox stays open source, handles legacy and unusual guests better, and keeps working on hosts where Workstation has … Read more

To back up a virtual machine properly, power it off cleanly or take a quiesced snapshot through the hypervisor, then copy the virtual disk together with its configuration files to storage on a different machine, and finish by restoring that copy in isolation to prove it boots. That whole chain matters, because a backup you … Read more

To install Docker on Windows with WSL2, you confirm hardware virtualization is on, run wsl –install from an elevated PowerShell window, install Docker Desktop and select the WSL 2 based engine, then enable WSL integration for your Linux distribution and run docker run hello-world. Most people get through it in 15 to 30 minutes, and … Read more

Folder sharing between a host and its virtual machine is a hypervisor feature, not an operating system feature, so the steps depend entirely on the platform you run. VirtualBox uses Guest Additions and the vboxsf driver, VMware Workstation and Player use VMware Tools and hgfs, Hyper-V relies on Enhanced Session Mode or a plain SMB … Read more