Can my CPU run VirtualBox/VMware?

You are correct. As per Intel, the B950 does not have any virtualisation support so cannot run VirtualBox. If you need to run a different operating system on that machine then you will need to use a multi-boot solution.


With many limitations we are able to use VirtualBox on a CPU that is not able to offer hardware virtualization:

Oracle VM VirtualBox does not require hardware virtualization features to be present. Through sophisticated techniques, Oracle VM VirtualBox virtualizes many guest operating systems entirely in software. This means that you can run virtual machines even on older processors which do not support hardware virtualization (source: oracle)

However the following scenarios need hardware virtualization and can not be acchieved without:

  • certain rare guest operating systems like OS/2
  • 64-bit guest and multiprocessing (SMP) support

We therefore are only able to virtualize a 32-bit guest if the CPU does not provide hardware virtualization. As 32-bit support was dropped in Ubuntu 20.04 you will need an older version of Ubuntu as a guest for virtualization. You should however be able to virtualize a 32-bit Windows. Obviously the performance will also have some limitations on a software virtualized system.

Also see: VirtualBox Manual on hardware virtualization