Does VMWare or any other 'virtualization software' alowe you to set the amount of CPU cores?

Question

I am setting up a testing PC to help find a weired bug on a single core computer. None of the PCs in our office have single core any more.

Can I use VMWare to something similar to emulate a single core PC on a multi-core computer?

Can you emulate a 32Bit version of windows with VMWare on a 64bit PC?

Answer 1

Yes for both questions with VMWare.

• You can change the number of CPUs (cores) to allocate for each Virtual Machine. If you allocate just one, you'll have your 1-core machine.

• You can install a 32-bit operating system on a 64-bit VMWare host.

Answer 2

Yes. Pretty much all the desktop virtualisation apps default to emulating a single-core 32-bit guest machine. (They may be using multiple host cores to do it.)

VMware and VirtualBox allow multiple cores to be configured and 64-bit guests; VirtualPC currently does not.