Advantages of running VMware Server on 64bit Linux host

[Ray Van Dolson]

> > Do you run your VMs with a 32bit or 64bit OS?
> 
> 32 bit. Our first VM host did not have VT support in the CPU, so we
> had no choice. We never bothered to experiment with 64 bit after that.
> For the size and needs of our VMs, it didn't really matter. Plus,
> having them as 32 bit guarantees their portability to non-VT hardware
> if needed.

Coming into this thread late, but here we use a mix.  We noticed that
on servers that had a lot of RAM (in the 8-32GB range), we ran into
memory management issues on the host where VMware would often get
killed by the OOM killer even though there was plenty of memory.

We managed to resolve most of these issues (running PAE kernel and some
sysctl tweaks), but on hosts with a lot of RAM running 64-bit CentOS or
RHEL as the host just made all those issues something we didn't even
have to deal with -- just worked.

YMMV of course!

Ray