VSphere 4 advanced, Can this work in a 32bit environment on ESXi

[vite1]

I have an ESXi hypervisor setup 32bit system. Hosting 2 DC and an Exchange box 2003 R2 enterprise edition 32bit as well; all installed on a Dell Power Edge 2950 quad core. In addition, I setup a Virtual iscsi FreeNas on top of the host for testing. Like to know if I can test some features of VSphere in this 32bit environment as far as some of the cloning and backup features go? I don't think I can do HA etc.. I would like to install the V Center part on a 2003 server VM as I did once before. All of this is just for testing in a Lab environment. If so please provide the correct link to the right version of VSpere I would need as I have a version now that doesn't work on this platform.

[VMmatty]

ESXi and ESX both now require 64-bit hardware in order to run. If you're trying to run ESXi on 32-bit hardware it more than likely will not work. If the underlying hardware is 64-bit then you should be able to install it and run either 32-bit or 64-bit virtual machines.

You can definitely upgrade to vCenter 4 and still manage your ESX 3.x hosts, but you won't get any of the advanced functionality without an ESXi 4 host and the proper license.