virtualbox only showing 32 bits options

I received  my new laptop from my work this week. In general I tend to be not that happy with receive a new laptop from work because it takes some time from your day to get everything back working again. However, this time I was more disappointed than normal as it turned out that I was not able to run 64 bit guests on my laptop and only 32 bits options where available.

After some checking I found out that my OS was a 64 bit OS and everything should work as far as I could see. However, only 32 bits options where available. As it turns out Windows 7 in combination with virtualbox is not allowing you to run 64 bit guests when certain virtualization is not enabled in the bios of your machine.

After turning on "Intel Virtualization Technology" and "Intel VT-d feature" virtualbox again allowed for running 64 bit guests.

Just a small reminder for everyone who runs into this issue. In case you have this enabled and it is not working, make sure that you disable Hyper-V on windows.

For more background information on this you can refer to ticket 12350 on the virtualbox website.