Wednesday, March 2, 2016

Oracle VM VirtualBox - Just a Misleading Error Message

Three weeks of fighting a "cold from hell" gave me time to think about my little project to automate a search for meteor photos.  Sure, I have a PINE64 on order.  Sure, it may be delivered later in March.  Sure, there may be a flavor of Linux available for it sometime soon.  Sure, I may be able to build ImageMagick and other tools I need for the Pine64.  Sure, the performance may be acceptable for my goal.  Crap, no planned PXE/net-boot planned.

What if...  Let's see...  a complete Pine64 compute node with 1GB Ram and the OS on an 8GB flash drive will cost roughly $35 accepting a lot of "maybe" assumptions.  Let's remove the assumptions and calculate the cost of a good old AMD or Intel processing node.  Looks like a 64 bit AMD based system with 4GB RAM, with PXE boot will run about $85.

So...  I decide to emulate a 32 bit Debian text-only install on an Orable VM Virtual box using 4GB Ram to sort-of emulate the AMD solution.  Which gives me an idea for a new word...

umulate - An emulation that is not exact; allowing certain differences for the sake of brevity or simplicity.  "I am going to umulate this Debian install; the real machine will not have a hard drive, but will boot from a flash drive."  But...  I digress...

BUT SMACK...  An error pops up from Oracle Virtualbox when I try starting the virtual machine...

Failed to open a session for the virtual machine DebianPNode.

Under "Details" it read...

VT-x is disabled in the BIOS for all CPU modes (VERR_VMX_MSR_ALL_VMX_DISABLED)

Well, after some research and comparing this virtual machine with the operational virtual version of Debian, I arrived at a repair that seemingly has nothing to do with the error.  I changed the Base Memory for this Virtual machine to 3072 GB and SHAZAM.  No more error.  Keep in mind, my machine has 8 GB and runs a pretty lean install of 64 bit Windows 7.  Why this misleading message popped up, I have no idea...  but reducing the Virtual machine's Base RAM fixed the problem.

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