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Cédric Girard
Asked: 2011-02-26 05:18:14 +0800 CST

Virtual machine : is it possible to run a 32 bits guest OS on a 64 bits host OS?

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I am a software developer, and I need to use old version of Borland/Embarcadero Delphi 7 for one software. The others ones are PHP software. I will have soon a 64 bits PC, running Linux, but I need a Windows 32 bits virtual machine for Delphi (because Delphi 7 is a bit old, and our clients still use Windows XP 32 bits systems). I already have a VM under virtualbox for my Delphi environment.

Will it run fine, or will I have some problem?

windows 32bit-64bit virtual-machines delphi

5 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Short answer, yes. You can almost always run 32bit software on 64bit hardware, just not the other way around.

    You can sometimes run 64bit software on a 32 bit host, as long as the hardware is 64bit, depending on the hypervisor.

    I currently have a Server 2008 Hyper-V role machine running several different OSes. I have about 6 WinXP 32 bit machines running, as well as several Win7 64bit.

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  2. To run your 32 bit code you do not need a 32 bit VM. You can safely use a Windows 64 bit which is a multi-lib environment. This means that it has libraries (DLLs) for both 32 bit and 64 bit. See: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/282423

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  3. yes it is totally possible because its a wholly seperate environment and kernel.

    its even possible to do this on OpenVZ based servers (where the kernel is actually shared)

    to my knowledge however i am not sure you can run a 64bit guest on a 32bit host even in virtualbox

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  4. You certainly can, provided that your new hardware supports it. Without hardware details it is difficult to be certain, however, I have seen very few 64-bit systems that do not support virtualization.

    That being said, you will need to decide on full- versus para-virtualization. Both are capable of functioning as you have described but there are differences between the two. It is also often possible to enable both and make the decision on a per (virtual) system basis.

    You will also need to ensure that your kernel supports, and is built for, virtualization support. Some systems, such as Debian and Red Hat, offer pre-built kernels for this purpose as well as options to add on a hardware virtual machine, such as Xen, or a processor emulator, such as Qemu.

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  5. It will run fine. I'm running a number of VMs (in VMWare), both with 32 and 64 bits versions of Windows and Delphi 7 is running just fine.

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