I believe that if you purchase the Dell Mobile Workstation series of laptops (M2400, M4400, M6400, etc) they do support VT in the BIOS.
Back to GMail2's question, VT and AMD-V are basically the same thing. They are functions implemented in the CPU hardware that accelerate virtualization-related tasks. I believe that the first generation was mostly concerned about fast context switching (switching from privileged mode to user mode and back again), which is something that hypervisors have to do frequently. The second generation of virtualization extensions seem to be focuses on nested/extended page tables, which is allows the CPU to keep track of the separate page tables of each VM within it's own page tables. These are all functions that have historically been implemented in software in the hypervisor, but by moving them into the CPU you can increase performance in virtual environments. There will undoubtedly be many more generations of hardware-assisted virtualization instructions.
On the other hand, 64-bit support is just what it sounds like. It is support for the AMD64 instruction set (also called x86-64, x64, and EM64T). This instruction set is a series of extensions to the IA32 32-bit instruction set that CPUs have been using since the days of the 386 CPU. This instruction set allows data to be processed in larger chunks, but most importantly it increases the amount of memory address space available, allowing systems to address more than 4GB of RAM without resorting to tricks like PAE and AWE.
The AMD64 instruction set was introduced in 2003 with the AMD Opteron CPU, and quickly found it's way into Athlon64 CPUs. All of AMDs CPUs have included 64-bit support for 4 or 5 years now, and before that only the most entry-level consumer CPUs from AMD (Sempron) did not support it. Shortly after the release of AMD64 Intel began incorporating their compatible version (EM64T) into their Pentium D processors. However, because Intel had previously been pushing IA64 (the Itanium architecture) as the 64-bit successor to IA32, they were slower than AMD to include this feature across all CPU lines. Today, just about all of Intel's CPUs support 64-bit instructions. The only exception that I can think of off the top of my head is the Atom CPU.
Server operating systems and hypervisors have been shifting to requiring 64-bit support for a couple of years now, based on the ever-increasing memory requirements of servers. Client operating systems are beginning to shift that direction as well.
When I say "modern" processors, I am generally referring to anything produced in the last 3-5 years. The reason that I say "most" modern processors is that Intel has used 64-bit support, and then VT support, as a differentiator between their product lines. Higher-end CPUs typically included these features, lower-end "consumer" CPUs (Celeron) typically did not include these features, and mid-range CPUs may or may not have had one or both of these features, depending on the particular model. Even today not all Core 2 CPUs have VT support, so if you're going with Intel it's best to check their feature matrix to be sure that the features that you want are supported.
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CompTIA A+, Network+, Server+, Security+
MCTS:Hyper-V
MCTS:System Center Virtual Machine Manager
MCSE:Security 2003
MCITP:Enterprise Administrator
I want to run an eval version of 2008 R2 as a virtual machine. I want to host this machine on my current Windows 7 machine which is 32 bit. Is this possible ? Or do I need a 64-bit host OS in order to eval R2, regardless of whether it's in a virtual machine or not ?