Not able to install 64bit guest inside of VMware on SLE

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Environment

SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 11

SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10

VMware ESX Server
VMware Workstation

VMware Server

Situation

Trying to install a guest inside a VMware product running on SLE10 or SLE11 results in the message

Cool computer...but this is a 32-bit system. You cannot install 64-bit software.

This happens even if the host OS was already installed in 64-bit mode.

Resolution

Please check the hardware and BIOS requirements for VMware Guest Operating systems:
An AMD64"revision D" CPU or Intel EM64T CPU with VT support is required. In case a Intel CPU is used, additionally the CPU virtualization support in the BIOS has to be enabled.

Additional Information

To check whether the CPU supports virtualization please run the command

cat /proc/cpuinfo

and check if the flags 'lm' (identifies the CPU as 64-bit) and 'vmx' (Intel virtualization) are present.

Please note: The output will show the flags anyway. It is no indicator whether CPU virtualization is enabled in the BIOS. It is just a proof that the CPU supports those features.

Please find more information in the VMware Knowledge Base under http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1901.

Disclaimer

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