Thing about Vagrant, VirtualBox and lack of hardware virtualization

If you don’t have a very modern computer with CPU supporting hardware virtualization, like me, and you want to use Vagrant, you’ll likely have lots of issues.

TL;DR: you’d better buy a new PC. Hardware virtualization is a must-have nowadays.

In case you don’t want to buy it, here’s some issues I had with Vagrant and how I fixed them.

VM can’t be started (even through VirtualBox GUI) due to “VT-x is not available”.

Solution: In this GUI select VM → Settings → System → Acceleration, then uncheck everything.

Acceleration tab is not active.

Solution: Go to the directory containing your VirtualBox VMs, then to your VM’s directory, then edit *.vbox XML file. Within <CPU> tag children (like <HardwareVirtEx> or <PAE>), replace every enabled="true" with enabled="false".

I can do that all with Vagrantfile and do not need to change my *.vbox config!

Solution: Even though you can turn hardware virtualization off via Vagrantfile (config.vm.customize ["modifyvm", :id, "--hwvirtex", "off"]), it might not work. At least it didn’t in my case. If it does the same for you, go and change your *.vbox XML file.

Still not working. What can be wrong?

Solution: Check if number of CPUs for your Vagrant virtual machine is greater than 1. If so, go and change the count of CPUs in your *.vbox file to one. (Yes, you could do it from Vagrantfile, but it may not work. It did not in my case.)