VMWare Workstation – Module ‘CPUIDEarly’ power on failed

Successfully installed VMWare Workstation on my Dell T5400 workstation, but when I went to power on my VM to finish installing, got the following error:

Module ‘CPUIDEarly’ power on failed.

Solution:

I have a Dell T5400 Workstation, so restart the PC (if already on)

1.) Press the “F2” button when the Dell logo appears to load the BIOS.
On Hewlett Packard PCs its “F10” to load the bios.

2.) Once the BIOS has loaded, use the keyboard arrows to scroll down to Performance.

3.) Hit the Right arrow key to expand the performance drop down.

4.) The two values I am looking for are Virtualization and VT for Direct I/O which are both set as “Off”.

5.) Select both settings to On, and press ESC to load into Windows.

You will not be able to power on the Virtual Machine.

Error while powering on – The Intel VMX Unrestricted Guest feature is necessary

Rebuilt one of my ESXi hosts into a windows server with VMWare Workstation  (future HomeLab update post coming).

First server that I started to build and powered on I got the following error:

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This host does not support virtualizing real mode. The Intel VMX Unrestricted Guest feature is necessary to run this virtual machine on an Intel processor.

Module CPUIDEarly power on failed.

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The reason this is the case if that in Workstation 14, the system requirements changed meaning that old CPUs like mine

Go to C:\ProgramData\VMWare\VMWare Workstation and add the following setting to the config.ini file:

monitor.allowLegacyCPU = “true”

Close VMWare Workstation and now you will be able to start the Virtual Machine.