Which of the following commands will allow the systems administrator to check whether the system supports virtualization?

A systems administrator installed a new software program on a Linux server. When the systems administrator tries to run the program, the following message appears on the screen.

Which of the following commands will allow the systems administrator to check whether the system supports virtualization?
A . dmidecode -s system-version
B . lscpu
C . sysctl -a
D . cat /sys/device/system/cpu/possible

View Answer

Answer: B

Explanation:

The command that will allow the systems administrator to check whether the system supports virtualization is lscpu. This command will display information about the CPU architecture, such as the number of CPUs, cores, sockets, threads, model name, frequency, cache size, and flags. One of the flags is vmx (for Intel processors) or svm (for AMD processors), which indicates that the CPU supports hardware virtualization. If the flag is present, it means that the system supports virtualization. If the flag is absent, it means that the system does not support virtualization or that it is disabled in the BIOS settings.

The other options are not correct commands for checking whether the system supports virtualization. The dmidecode -s system-version command will display the version of the system, such as the product name or serial number, but not the CPU information. The sysctl -a command will display all the kernel parameters, but not the CPU flags. The cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/possible command will display the range of possible CPUs that can be online or offline, but not the CPU features.

Reference: lscpu(1) – Linux manual page; How To Check If Virtualization is Enabled in Windows 10 / 11