Hi Everyone,

I have a new HP Workstation that i want to install both Windows & Linux on and be able to use Windows as my primary (Host) operating system and be able to run Linux from it without booting the system in Linux. Can this be done using VMware Workstation? or Exceed? I am trying to install on Windows VMware but i am getting an error that saids that it is for a 32 bit system but the version of VMware we are instaling is 64 bit and the Workstation is also a 64 bit System. The Linux is yet to be installed on the System.

Any suggestion on what might be wrong would be appreciated.

Thanks!

Jimmy

Let me try to get this straight. You are not planning to dual boot instead you want to install Windows on your workstation and then using VMware Workstation you want to install Linux machine as guest.

Did you check which version of Windows you installed, it is a 32 bit version or 64 bit version you installed on the system. You can check that from right clicking on My Computer and then properties.

If your machine is 64 bit then it shouldn't give problem installing either 32 bit or 64 bit version of VMware. The only possible explanation is that you have installed 32 bit Windows on 64 bit machine which inturn messing up with your VMware 64 bit install.

The other issue is windows vs linux memory management. Windows wants to keep ram free and linux will use all ram before hitting swap. If you try to host guests on Windows the OS spends a lot of time swappping your guest's ram off to disk. Linux works much better as a host.

Hi All,

@ T3RM1NVT0R: I have just checked and the system we installed is 64 bit Windows system. The VMware is already installed (Trier Version) and the question is how do you get the guest Linux system (In this case SUSE) to run from Windows? Can you kindly outline the procedure to follow if you have the VMware installed and you want to run Linux as guest? Maybe we are doing something wrong.

@ engine: I would not mind making Linux the host but the problem is that the main operating system in our company is Windows and things like emails access, Inventor, etc., can only be run over the Windows network. I Need Linux for some computational work like with OpenFoam, CAELinux, etc. I hope it works with Windows as host.

Thanks!

Jimmy

Yes I have Windows machine which hosts a SLES guest VM but installing a VM is pretty trivial. I mean you just click on new virtual machine and then the wizard will take you through the whole process.

Is it possible for you to share the screenshot of the issue or the exact error message that you get when you try to create a Linux guest VM on VMware workstation.

The exact error message i am getting is: "Cool Software, but .....This is a 32-bit Computer. You cannot use 64-bit Software on it" and this is followed by "Reboot".

It should be pretty simple and so i do not know whether it is an openSUSE Problem? Would using Ubuntu or Fedora, etc do?

Its been a while since I've used vmware but I would bet its similar to VirtualBox. When you are creating your guest you have to specify the architecture and there are some settings that will make it appear as 32 or 64 bit. You probably just need to change that in vmware.

https://communities.vmware.com/thread/440322 gives some things to check.

Windows 2000 had a reg key where you could change the % of free memory windows had before swapping, MS removed that in XP and later. We had all windows workstations at the office and upgrading from 2000 to XP the guest performance suffered greatly. We had to double the ram in all the systems to give enough overhead to stay out of swap all the time. Also for running heavy guests get a second hdd in the machine had put the guest images on it and keep the swap file separate.

My personal record is 4 guest windows servers running at the same time (Domain controller, SQL server, App/Citrix server, web server). Windows 2000 was able to do it with 2G or ram and two hard disks, Linus I was able to do it on a netbook with 2G of ram and one hdd. Windows XP/7 required 8G of ram to run two guest servers.

To be honest I have heard first time of that error message. I have got two machines one is 32 bit and one is 64 bit and both have VMware workstation installed on it. On 64 bit machine I run different linux distributions as guests which are 64 bit and on 32 bit machine I run the distributions which are 32 bit.

Once I tried to installed (just for fun) 64 bit guest distribution on my 32 bit machine and I got pretty rude message ;-) saying your machine is 32 bit machine and is cannot run 64 bit guest operating system. You are getting something which says cool stuff.

I am assuming that you have got this machine pre-installed with Windows 7. I would be nice to know if you have got VMware pre-installed as well, something like add on software that they gave you?

If not and you have installed it yourself and it is a trial version, I would suggest downloading it again from: https://my.vmware.com/web/vmware/det...=462&rPId=7456 and then try to perform the guest install.

Though guest distribution shouldn't be an issue, I mean it is not complaining about the distribution but the architecture. You can try installing any other distribution before you go ahead with VMware workstation re-install

It is now working. I had to enable virtualization under BIOS since it was disabled.

Thanks so much for your help and Support.

Jimmy

You're welcome and thanks for sharing the solution. Though the error was pretty misleading. It should have said something related to VT (Virtualization Technology) that could point to BIOS instead of complaining about architecture.