Make sure virtualization is enabled in the BIOS

I just wasted a fair amount of time on a RedHat 6.1 box being setup to be a hypervisor with KVM, trying to figure how why when I ran virsh version it was telling me among other things

internal error Cannot find suitable emulator for x86_64

All the appropriate packages such as qemu-kvm were installed, but it just didn't seem to want to work. Finally as I was about to try reinstalling RHEL, I remoted into the actual console and saw:

kvm: disabled by bios

Doh!, and looking back in /var/log/messages the same thing was buried deep within all the boot noise. While trying to figure this out I managed to just be looking for virt or qemu in the logs and somehow didn't search for kvm. Enabled virtualization in the BIOS and everything's gravy now.

So there you go, if you're Googling that first error message and get lots of other nonsense, look for the message about the BIOS.