What are the HW and Firmware Requirements for 64-bit Guest OS’s on VMware Cloud Hosting?

Vmware Hardware virtualization technique initially utilized different segments to deliver isolation between guest OS and VM monitor. It’s important as the gues OS and VM machine monitor share the linear address space.

In order to view if your CPU is appropriate for running 64-bit guess OS, VMware provides a free utility which can be downloaded from their site and seems quite useful. Although, no support is provided from VMware and also does not require any VMware server or VMware Workstation.

To understand, VMware Workstation, Player and Server do require 64-bit CPU to run 64-bit guest OS. VMware Fusion also requires a 64-bit processor to run a 64-bit guess OS to run any MAC OS guest.

MAC OS guess require hardware virtualization which VMware only supports on 64-bit processors but Intel Core Solo and Core Duo processors are 32-bit and the newer one’s are 64-bit.

VMware workstation 5.5 to 6.c, Player and VMware Server 1.x all support VM with 64-bit guest OS on host machines and have either one of the following 64-bit processors :

1. AMD Athlon 64
2. AMD Opteron
3. AMD Turion 64
4. AMD Sempron, 64-bit capable
5. Intel EM64T VT-enabled processors

To understand your infrastructure and installation of VMware per your servers and their architecture is wise before deployment of any of your cloud computing services.