Migrating virtual (VMWare) workstations from AMD to Intel hardware

Solution 1:

You would only theoretically have problems if you live migrated your VMs from an AMD processor to an Intel processor (i.e. vMotion), so vSphere just won't allow a vMotion in this scenario. If you shut down the VM and then start it up again on the new processor, you will be fine, provided the guest OS isn't particularly processor-dependent. (For the most part this is Windows 2000 and older operating systems.)

Solution 2:

Can you provide more information on the VMware infrastructure?

It sounds like you're running some variant of VMware vSphere rather than the VMware Workstation product.

• Is your hardware a collection of desktops or are they physical servers?
• Do you know the makes/models involved?
• Will there be any change in the versions of VMware involved as well?

In either case, you'd be looking at cold migrations in order to make the existing guests work. That's essentially the process of shutting the VM down, moving its physical location (or the server it's running on), then powering up.

AMD -> Intel is not a problem in this case.

Also note that if there's going to be a version change in the VMware product being used, there's also the matter of upgrading the actual virtual machine's hardware version and its guest tools.