VMWare

The next environment we discuss is VMWare. In this case, we ran Windows 7 under VMWare Workstation 6.5.2. However, any VMWare product will support the 32-bit x86 platform that you need to run Windows 7, and virtually any VMWare product that you can get will also support 64-bit Windows 7 installations if your underlying hardware will support it. In practice, this means that you can run Windows 7 virtually under VMWare installed on Windows XP, Vista, Server 2003, Server 2008, any recent version of Linux, and Macintosh OS. The precise operating system requirements may vary depending on which version of VMWare you are using. VMWare Server, for example, requires that you use a server version of Windows as your host operating system; Windows XP and Windows Vista would not work properly.

Note: To run the 64-bit version of Windows 7 as a virtual system under VMWare, your host system must have a 64-bit processor and a BIOS compatible with x86 virtualization. Intel systems require VT hardware virtualization, and AMD64 processors must be revision D or later. Also, see the discussion earlier in this tutorial about hardware virtualization requirements under Windows XP Mode.

You should note the minimum system requirements for running Windows 7 under VMWare shown in Table below.