On Feb 25, 2011, at 9:01 AM, Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com> wrote: > On 2/25/11 7:33 AM, Scott Robbins wrote: >> On Thu, Feb 24, 2011 at 10:36:28PM -0800, David Brian Chait wrote: >>> >>> I think you need to download the VI3 rather than 4.1 to use 32 bit support, but it does work. I have it in production on some older hardware and it has not let me down yet. >> >> I believe David is correct. We had some old machines we were going to >> use with 4.1, but they were 32 bit and so we weren't able to use them. > > There are cpus that are 64 bit (with the lm flag) but don't have hardware > virtualization (vt). Not sure if they can run ESXi or not, but with > server/player they can run 32-bit guests only. CPUs with the vt option (and in > some cases this can be enabled/disabled in the bios) can run 64-bit guests under > vmware server/player even if the host runs a 32-bit OS. I think the support goes like this: 32-bit OS (VI3) can run 32-bit software virtualization, but not 64-bit virtualization without hardware virtualization support. 64-bit OS (VI4) can't run without hardware virtualization support at all. VMware doesn't see software virtualization as performing well enough to continue supporting modern workloads, so it dropped it in 4.1 I believe. I think 4.0 might have supported 32-bit non-hardware virtualization though. -Ross