SOASTA CloudTest Lite ova VM does not start after import to VirtualBox w/ error: "Your cpu does not support long mode. Use a 32bit distribution."

Question

Trying to run some load tests on a website for performance comparisons. I downloaded the SOASTA CloudTest Lite VM (OVA file) because it runs up to 100 cloud-based zombies for free, has some rather nifty-looking graphy-things and a plugin to pull performance data from my server (on AWS).

It's set up to run on VMWare, but I already have VirtualBox and I really didn't want to install VMWare Player as well, since it has less features and would be redundant.

Using VirtualBox 4.3.10, I imported the ova. Shown as working on the SOASTA forums here.

Booting in VirtualBox I get this error:

Your cpu does not support long mode. Use a 32bit distribution.

3 seconds of Googling of course uncovers hundreds (maybe thousands!) of people trying to run 64-bit guests without hardware virtualization (VT-x) enabled. Easy fix! But not so fast... My laptop has an i7-2720QM and I'm certain VT-x is enabled in my BIOS; to check my sanity, I open CPU-Z and it shows VT-x enabled. Also, VirtualBox has no problem letting me install a new 64-bit guest (it is limited to 32-bit guest installs if VT-x is not on.)

Answer 1

After wading through tens of googly results, I came across this page on the virtualbox forums which is not exactly my issue, but it does point out that an incorrect "Version" in the general tab settings can cause VirtualBox to throw this error.

Checking the settings I see it's set to Type: Other and Version: Other/Unknown

Changing these to Type: Linux and Version: Linux 2.6 / 3.x allowed the VM to boot.