How to determine if a CPU supports SLAT

To use Hyper-V within Windows 8, the CPU must support SLAT.

Second Level Address Translation (SLAT) is a technology introduced in both Intel and AMD flavors of processors.  Both companies call their version of the technology different names:   Intel’s version is called EPT(Extended Page Tables) and AMD calls theirs RVI (Rapid Virtualization Indexing).  Intel introduced Extended Page Tables in its processors that were built on the Nehalem architecture, while AMD only introduced RVI in their third generation of Opteron processors codenamed Barcelona.

Hyper-V uses SLAT to perform more VM memory management functions and reduce the overhead of translating guest physical addresses to real physical addresses. By doing this, Hypervisor CPU time is significantly reduced, and more memory is saved for each VM.

To determine if a CPU supports SLAT, download the CoreInfo utility from Sysinternals at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/cc835722.  Unzip the application and use the –v switch option within an elevated prompt.  If the processor does not support SLAT, dashs will be present in the EPT or NPT rows.