Hi Przemek,

What is the exact error message?

Support for 64-bit guest operating systems

Workstation 5.5 supports virtual machines with 64-bit guest operating systems only on host machines that have one of the supported 64-bit processors:

* AMD Athlon 64, revision D or later
* AMD Opteron, revision E or later
* AMD Turion 64, revision E or later
* AMD Sempron, 64-bit-capable revision D or later (experimental support)
* Intel EM64T VT-capable processors (experimental support)

The message is most likely that you do not have a compatible processor to run a 64 bit guest.

You can download the 64-bit processor check utility from the VMware web site at http://www.vmware.com/download/ws/drivers_tools.html

If your processor is a Intel EM64T VT-capable processor, you may have to enable VT in the BIOS of your PC.

After you enable VT in the BIOS, turn off and back on the PC.
Please run the 64 bit cheacker and post the exact output from this utility.

What update of Solaris 10 are you running? Earlier releases of Solaris 10 misidentified the Core processors as the Pentium 3 family, and would not run natively or in a VM. The problem has been addressed in Solaris 10 Update 3.

Yes, that is update 2. It doesn't run (in 64-bit mode) on Core processors. See Sun's bug #6417900.

You may also be able to work around this issue in a VM by claiming to be a P4. Try adding the following to your Solaris .vmx file:

cpuid.1.eax = "----:0000:0000:0000:----:1111:0010:1001"

Of course, this would not be recommended for a production system, since MSRs, PMCs, etc. differ from one processor family to another. However, if you just want to try out Solaris, it may suffice.