No 64-Bit Support for VI Client
I just came across an annoyance that might seem small to some, but to others looms larger. I recently bought a 64-bit Windows Vista laptop (HP Pavilion, if you're curious -- great deal at Best Buy for a dual-core Intel, 4GB RAM machine). One of my primary reasons for the purchase was virtualization. All that RAM and dual-core (along with a decent sized hard drive) means I should have lots of room for loading virtual machines (VMs).
One other thing I was looking forward to was running VMware's virtual infrastructure client on it. But alas, it's not to be. That's because VI 2.5 (the latest version) doesn't work on 64-bit OSes.
Huh?
I would think VMware would have produced a 64-bit compatible client some time ago. It's not like 64-bit is brand new, even on PCs. And folks who would be using the VI client are much more likely than the general populace to be running 64-bit. So where's the support, VMware? This is a ridiculous oversight, in my opinion.
Yeah, there are workarounds. Here's a kludgy one that seems to work. The simplest one would be to load 32-bit Windows XP or Vista into a VM, and run the VI client through that. But, of course, that adds another layer of complexity and slows your system down. Running natively is the way to go here.
I can't imagine this is an insurmountable technical issue. Why the delay?
By the way, if there is a 64-bit client supported now, I'd love to be corrected. Please let me know.
Important Update:
And they did let me know! My information is out of date. The VI Client does work on 64-bit Windows now. According to this VMware knowledgebase article, it does require Microsoft's .NET Framework, version 2.0, to be installed first. Once that's done, however, VI Client 2.5 should work fine. Many thanks to the VMware engineer who gave me the link, and my apologies to VMware for the old information.
Posted by Keith Ward on 10/16/2008 at 12:48 PM