Looks like we will be forced to stay at the 3.0.2 and VC 2.0.2 software level. 4 of the 6 administrators who use VIC on a daily basis here, including myself all run x64 operating systems on our workstations. Be they XP or Vista.

Looks like it's time to find an account manager to start yelling at loudly.

I've done a "straw poll" worldwide, albeit internally - to my peers to gauge the level of interest, complaints etc in regards to not supporting 64-bit client. To date, only the posts listed here are the only customers worldwide who have said they needed this client to be 64-bit. You do have a valid point that the checker has only now kicked in, so maybe there is a "hidden" 64-bit ADMIN workstation community, which has NOT been seen before by VMware.

As mentioned on a previous post, the documentation has always stated 32-bit requirement for the client, since the overwhelming OS for the desktop worldwide, including IT administration, is still 32-bit based. We have focused our efforts to provide 64-bit support for Linux and Windows and our ESX kernel, which is where we saw the demand - the server backend.

This doesn't mean VMware doesn't care about our customers, or for being shortsighted, etc - each support effort requires backend processes and testing to provide true support for a product. In this case 64-bit client support would entail full integration with the vendor OS (Windows and the various flavours of Linux) - not just "get it to work". That's a huge effort if you think about the amount of OS changes that need to be vetted properly to ensure a working product, support processes in the back-end and continuous development. I want to be clear - VMware is not saying "it's just not worth it", we are saying "do we need to shift resources right now?"

Now this doesn't mean we are not going to ever have support for a 64-bit client, but to be frank it will most likely will not occur immediately as requested by some people. We have also seen issues with some of the OS components in the 64-bit environment, hence the OS checker has been activated. What I will ask if it is possible to remove the OS checker restriction to allow customers to "go it alone" with no support, but even that has it's own issues as some people would assume support since it installed. Maybe a warning message with a check-box so you could agree to "go it alone" before install?

Now I know it's not the true solution you are looking for - but you've all run workstation in the pass to support applications that may not run on your host environment - this would be one of those situations as a workaround temporarily. A small 32-bit XP with the client that you could suspend\activate when needed would do the trick.

Finally , we do listen - this has been raised internally to the executive level in the US by myself just yesterday. We are contiuously evaluating where to put our resources for a variety of products and we will look at this issue from a global perpective in order to make the right decision for all of our customers.

Regards,

Andre Kemp

Sr. Product Marketing Manager

VMware, APAC

Thanks for your response. It's good to see such a request taken seriously. The ability as you say to "go it alone" would be useful in the current situation. I've given consideration to creating a VM as you say on my desktop to run the new client in. My hesitation around this is that next to my web browser and email client the VI Client is where is spend most of my day and having to work within a VM constantly would become tedious fairly quickly. I've done it before when my previous desktop machine was a macintosh.

Hopefully, we'll see some encouraging progress around this in future product updates.

On the server side, my best practice is to install WS2003 x64 on capable hardware, barring known application incompatibilities. Most 32-bit apps we use run fine on x64. I doubt that VMware or other ISVs will be pushed to support x64 OS's unless customers proactively adopt it. Please know that many of us want to move to x64 OS's natively to support the processors we've been purchasing for over 2 years, as well as to avoid purchasing WS2003 Enterprise for systems with 4GB-32GB of RAM.

Thanks,
-Alex Harden