Are you able to install a 64-bit VM on a 32-bit host?

Question

On my Windows XP SP3 (32-bit) machine (Intel Pentium Dual CPU E2140 1.60GHz, 3GB RAM), I installed VirtualBox (4.0.10). I then tried to install a 64-bit OS like Windows 7 64-bit or Windows Server 2008 R2 64-bit on the VM. However I got an error.

I think the error stated that my machine is unable to run a 64-bit OS but actually VirtualBox in this case should be capable of running 64-bit OSes on a 32-bit host. Is that right?

Answer 1

The following was approximately copied from here:

VirtualBox supports 64-bit guest operating systems on 32-bit host operating systems, provided that the following conditions are met:

1. You need a 64-bit processor with hardware virtualization support.
2. You must enable hardware virtualization for the particular VM for which you want 64-bit support; software virtualization is not supported for 64-bit VMs.
3. If you want to use 64-bit guest support on a 32-bit host operating system, you must also select a 64-bit operating system for the particular VM. Since supporting 64 bits on 32-bits incurs additional overhead, VirtualBox only enables this support upon explicit request.

According to this, your processor cannot meet the 2nd condition because it does not support "Intel® Virtualization Technology (VT-x)".