insert Virtualization Hypervisor between hardware and existing OS

Question

There didn't seem to be a dedicated Virtualization SE, so...

I am looking to install VMware vSphere Hypervisor 5.1 (or an older version if it helps) on a 64bit AMD A8 architecture.

Is there a path to doing this without destroying/having to reinstall Windows 8 already preinstalled by the Vendor (Acer), making it one of the VMs instead?

Or in general? (Eg. on another PC running 32bit Ubuntu, where I would like to "insert" a Hypervisor as well).

Answer 1

Use VMware Converter. It converts a physical machine into a VM during runtime. It is freely downloadable after registering on the VMware site:

http://www.vmware.com/products/converter/

Answer 2

Yes, you can install VMware Workstation and then install vShpere Hypervisor 5.1 as a guest OS. I have done that before. VMware Workstation supports the so called nested virtualization which means you it can expose the hardware virtualization feature of CPU which is required by vSphere to the guest OS. If you don't want to pay for VMware Workstation, you can use VMware Player which is free but capable of nested virtualization.