Porting Virtual Images across CPU types

[Jubal95]

This is probably a bit of a newbie thread but I cannot find a clear answer.

I've been using VMware Workstation for some years, on may laptop but recently a question came up I couldn't answer.

I'm currently part of a team looking at providing a virtual training/demonstration environment on blade servers

One additional time saving benefit I was hoping to achieve was that the Virtual Machine Images could be given to other members of the team to test on their laptops which are well specced i.e 2GB of RAM.

One of the administrators I in the team is adamant that the images will not port from say an Intel Server cpu to an Intel Pentium Mobile cpu on a laptop.

My view was that one of the whole points of virtualisation, is virtualisation of the hardware so the machines are portable.

Anyone got something that describes when this will work, what the gotchas are, or just something of clarity that can tell me I'm either right (i.e the images are portable) or wrong.

Perhaps a link to a doc or something.

Many Thanks

Jubal

 

[comtec17]

The images are portable only across the same CPU architecture. This means you cannot take a VM Image from a Xeon CPU and move it to AMD Opteron, or take a XEON CPU to a Celeron laptop, etc. This is due to the differences with instruction sets and a few other items.

You can find this on

http://www.vmware.com

and review the documentation.

 

[Arisap]

Comtec17, can you please verify your statement. I have taken a VM from my laptop and booted it successfully on an HP DL585 (AMD Opteron). I have also booted VM's created on Xeon processor machines on my laptop and have even booted them on non-Xeon servers. In fact the other day, a co-worker gave me a Vm of Windows 2k3 R2 he created for a client, that he first moved to his laptop (which is a celeron) and my laptop is a mobile M

 

[comtec17]

Are you using GSX or VM Workstation, or are you using ESX?

 

[Arisap]

I have been able to move VM's from ESX to Workstation and vise versa. One does have to be careful though about Workstation 5. Any Vm created in VM WS 5 not as "legacy" will need to be P2V'd to work on ESX.