Virtualization Enabled in BIOS A08 for XPS M1530.

Virtualization is a very complex topic and even more difficuilt if it comes to benchmarking. A common misunderstanding is that hardware virtualization is faster than software virtualization.

Hardware virtualization is in general often slower than Software (read: Binary Translation or Paravirtualization) virtualization. The reason is that hardwae virtualization allows a very simple and greedy approach, for trapping guest OS priviledged instructions. The downside is that this kind of hardware virtualization in general is slower than Binary Translation (the latter uses caching and also results in less context switches).

However the most state-of-the-art and efficient (but not that mature regarding stability) virtualization techniques facilitate a mixed hardware and software virtualization approach. In cases where software virtualization is faster using this one and in other cases the hardware approach.

The bottom line for the general user is:

. it doesn't actually matter for you whether your virtualization software uses software or hardware. At least not performance wise.

. it also doesn't matter from the "safety" perspective. Both Software and hardware approaches are safe. Only the combined ones (however the most promising ones) are still in the evolving stage.

You will find all this in the documentation of VM solutions. E.g.:

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VirtualBox UserManual p38: 

Enable VT-x/AMD-V This setting determines whether the virtualization engine will
try to use the host CPU’s hardware virtualization extensions such as Intel VTx
and AMD-V. Normally, you should leave this setting disabled as VirtualBox employs sophisticated software techniques which normally yield superior performance compared to hardware virtualization

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I'm not sure what your point is, but with the VT option enabled and VMWare 6, I can run a 64 bit OS on 32 bit windows.  This allows me to demo my 64 bit apps on Server 2008 x64 without hauling around a machine running a dedicated x64 OS.  VirtualBox can't help me there, can it?

My point is: Reading your post people might believe they either require VT BIOS support for virtualization or they get a speed boost.

VirtualBox does not provide a x86_64 OS ontop of a x86 host.

I am not sure about VMWare: Yes, x86_64 OS ontop of x86 host works, but I can not tell, whether it requires VT Hardware support. The VMWare documentation doesn't tell:

http://pubs.vmware.com/guestnotes/wwhelp/wwhimpl/js/html/wwhelp.htm 

VMWare does not require VT support to run 32 bit OS's on a 32 bit OS, but it does require it to run 64 bit OSes on a 32 bit OS. 

I would suspect that VirtualBox if they ever support 64 bit on 32 bit would require it as well.