Thursday, November 12, 2009

Virtualization Technology versus VMWare Server :)

Spent quite some time trying to make VMWare Server run 64-bit system (linux gentoo) on the host with 64-bit processor (and 32-bit Vista, which was actually not the problem but seemed to prevent the VM from detecting 64-bit proc). Luckily, I have found this article which cleared up the mist for me :)

What I did wrong:
- I should not have enabled all VT settings. I had Dell OptiPlex 960 with E8400 Intel Core2 Duo processor, and in my BIOS there were 3 settings under Virtualization Support, including the one mentioning "trusted execution". This one should not have been enabled;
- I should have powered the PC down. Virtualization settings are locked when the machine powers up and simple reboot is not enough to change them!

One other thing I did now:
- I have added the setting mentioned in this article:
hv.enableIfUnlocked = TRUE
to my VMWare Server configuration file (I have a Vista Ultimate machine and it happens to be found at C:\ProgramData\VMWare\VMWare Server\config.ini).
May be this also helped, don't feel like disabling it again now when the things work:)