Henning Stoverud Not so interresting personal site

Attempting to load a 64-bit application, however this CPU is not compatible with 64-bit mode

Today I installed VMware Server in order to run Windows Server 2008 x64 as a guest OS. My laptop has a 64 bit processor and I'm running Windows 7 x64 on it, so I assumed it should work just fine to install Windows Server 2008 x64 in WMware. However, when trying to boot from the installation DVD, I got the error "Attempting to load a 64-bit application, however this CPU is not compatible with 64-bit mode." as shown in the screenshot below.

To make sure the CPU was really able to run 64 bit, I downloaded and ran the Workstation Processor Check for 64-Bit Compatibility. As expected, this tool showed that the CPU should work just fine with a 64-bit guest OS.

After some more investigation, it turns out there is a BIOS setting for enabling virtualization. After enabling "Intel Virtualization Technology", the problem was fixed.