The rumor was that with using VMware virtualization software you could run a 64 bit host on a 32 bit host as long as you had the right processor. I’ve done pretty much nothing with any type of VM other than downloading them and letting them sit.  After deciding that it might be worthwhile to be able to have Exchange at Woodland I wanted to get a VM installed to play with to see if it would meet our needs. Our new server runs Windows Server 2008 Enterprise 32 bit, which was great except for the fact that Exchange 2007 will only run in 64 bit. Because of this I tried to do Exchange 2003 which also wouldn’t work on Server 2008 32 bit.  After much googling and talking with some other church IT guys, I realized that you can’t run any Exchange on 2008 server bit.  So this is where the search began for running a 64 bit guest on a 32 bit host.  It wasn’t possible with Microsofts virtualization product but it WAS possible with the VMware product.

There are a few requirements of your processor to allow it to able to handle 64 bit operating systesm.  It has to have Intel VT and also have EMT64.  You may have to update the bios to enable the Intel Vt before VMware will allow you to install the 64 bit OS. VMware has a free utility that will check your hardware to see if it can handle the 64 big guest, this is the easiest way versus looking up processor specs and such, there is a utility for both windows and linux.

After everything is setup the installation was quite straight forward, nothing came up out of the ordinary.