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Binoj Antony
Asked: 2010-02-04 05:41:44 +0800 CST

Does VMWare Player 3.0 require Intel-VT capable processor

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I have Dell Studio laptop with Intel E6600 processor, I have checked and confirmed that this processor does not have Intel-VT support. (Its available in 6670 available on Dell Vostro)
Has anyone practially used VMWare Player 3.0 on a machine/laptop with processor not having Intel-VT support.

Some references.
Link # 1
Link # 2

[Edit]
I tried Virtual PC from MS and it does not work due to the absence of Intel-VT.
My OS is Windows 7 Professional 64Bit
I need to run only Windows 2003 32 bit Standard and Ubuntu, is this possible with the player 3.0?

virtualization intel-vt-x vmware-player dell windows-7

3 Answers

  1. It should work, but you'll only be able to run 32bit OSes (at least if it's the same as VMware Server, VirtualBox, etc etc)

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  2. Hardware Virtualization is not required for Workstation 7 or Player 3 for 32 bit Guests although it may be required for 64 bit Guests. It is definitely required if you intend to virtualize ESX.

    The links you provided are for ESX 4.

    Edited to add: The Release 3 Installation Guide specifies the following:

    Processor Support for 64-Bit Guest Operating Systems When you power on a virtual machine with a 64-bit guest operating system, VMware Player performs an internal check. If the host CPU is not a supported 64-bit processor, you cannot power on the virtual machine.

    VMware Player supports virtual machines with 64-bit guest operating systems, running on host machines with the following processors:
    - Revision D or later of AMD Athlon 64, Opteron, Turion 64, and Sempron
    - Intel Pentium 4 and Core 2 processors with EM64T and Intel Virtualization Technology

    Provided the OS you want to install is supported by Player 3 then you can install any 32bit Guest OS you like using that processor. Many Ubuntu versions are supported but generally VMware Tools support for the most recent releases tends to take some time. You can find the full list of supported Guest OS's in the document linked above. Unsupported OS's may still work but performance may be poor or there may just be some compatibility issues that do not affect you so its always worth a try.

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  3. VMware frequently does not use VT, because their technology often provides better performance than is possible with VT. E.g., VMware Workstation allows you to enable VT use, but the default on my machine is to not use it. In fact, usually VT needs to be enabled in the BIOS, because there are attacks on VT (and similar technologies) such as the BluePill attack that are pretty scary.

    See for example this link, which is about VMware Server not needing VT: http://communities.vmware.com/thread/191399

    The links you provided are about trying to run VMware ESX server, VMware's bare-metal hypervisor (runs directly on the host machine, without a host OS), inside of VMware Workstation or Player. This is a very unusual configuration, primarily used for testing ESX. If you think about it for a moment, it will make sense that running VMware's most powerful product within one of their other products requires some special support.

    As far as 32-bit and 64-bit, I think I've run 64-bit guests within my 32-bit host OS without enabling VT, but I'm not sure. VirtualPC is not a fair comparison, because VMware basically invented x86 virtualization more than a decade ago.

    Honestly, downloading and running Player will be pretty quick. If you have an Ubuntu ISO, you can simply mount that and run it as a LiveCD within player. Actually doing Ubuntu installation doesn't take that long. Windows Server installation will be slower, but I would bet that it will work.

    Once you've got things set up, you might look into using VMware Server, which is also free, and more powerful than VMware Player.

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