Help with 64 bit...or 32 bit?

[bizzopo]

Hello all,

Was wondering if anyone could help me out here. I have a VDS with Windows 2008 R2. I am using this VDS to access from home, and in class as I use it for some of my labs. Currently I am working on a few labs that require I use Oracle Virtual Box in order to create a few virtual machines. The virtual machines I need to create for these labs are a Windows 2012, Windows 2008R2, Windows 7, and Windows 8.1. I am basically downloading the ISO files from the Microsoft website(180 day trial versions). However I have ran into an issue. When I try to install 2012/2008R2 or the 64 bit versions of the other two operating systems I receive a stop error during install basically complaining that Windows cannot install the 64 bit version on 32 bit hardware. I understand from researching the issue a bit that in order to get around this you need to enable a virtualization option in the BIOS? Since this is a VDS this is not an option for me. I was wondering if anyone had any other way to get around this little problem. I am using the 64 bit version of Windows 2008 R2 as I understand it doesn't even come in a 32 bit version. Unfortunately the school I'm attending can't at the moment can't seem to afford to upgrade their computers in lab so we're required to either use our personal laptops or find some other means to complete the labs. Unfortunately again my laptop doesn't have the capacity to complete the work which is why I went this route not that it's relevant.

Thanks in advance for any replies.

[Edge100x]

Virtualization within virtualization is still not very well-tested and is relatively buggy. We don't have any knobs to turn on our end to try to help apart from trying a Xen upgrade for you, but you might have some knobs within VirtualBox, or you might try using another virtualization system such as VMWare.

[Peep]

If you do consider other virtualization software, Hyper-V is also a great option if you're emulating Windows within Windows. If you do take this option and run into problems running the evaluation ISO's, try renaming it or making a copy of it with a different name. This is something I Ran into personally -- Hyper-V doesn't like the naming format used by Microsoft's very own ISO files.

One downside to Hyper-V is that it also prevents itself from installing if it detects your OS is virtualized, but I believe it can only detect this if the host system is running Hyper-V, which isn't the case for an NFO VDS.