VMware's Player

A great tool. I just installed a 64-bit Windows OS inside the player and it works. As you can see from the screenshot, the Ferrari 4000 runs Windows XP Professional x64 Edition and is the host. 2 instances of VMware Player run 2 VMs, one is 32-bit, the other 64-bit. Great tool for demos that require more than one 64-bit OS and you have to travel to a customer site. Just take your laptop, install a few VMs and off you go.

How did I install the 64-bit VM in the first place? I downloaded VMware Workstation trial and created an empty Windows guest OS environment. Back in player, booting this environment picked up the XP x64 boot CD in the host drive and that's all. From there it is a standard install.

Of course, a license of VMware Workstation would also do the magic but this is more fun and the player is for free. The Microsoft virtualization products don't support 64-bit guest OSses.

Cool.

Comments

• Anonymous
  November 02, 2005
  Can it coexist along with MS VPC? I would like to run a version of linux and MS VPC doesnt support it well.
• Anonymous
  November 02, 2005
  Kris - on my laptop I run Virtual Server along with VMware Player on Windows XP Professional x64 Edition. Unfortunately MS Virtual PC does not support 64-bit host OS.
• Anonymous
  November 03, 2005
  Hmm, when I try to install XP x64 guest OS in the VMPlayer on my x64 machine (running XP x64) it says that my CPU is not compatible with x64 mode! I have 2 Intel Xeon processors with EM64T enabled. Any ideas?
• Anonymous
  November 03, 2005
  Jack - I see the same issue when installing on a dualcore Xeon pre-production unit. On the Ferrari 4000 with an AMD Turion 64-bit it works like a charm. VMware has a CPU check utility (somewhere) on their website. The documentation on http://www.vmware.com/pdf/processor_check.pdf mentions: “Intel® EM64T VT-capable processors (experimental support)”
• Anonymous
  November 09, 2005
  You don't need a trial version in order to create virtual machines, see http://johnbokma.com/vmware-player/