It's been a long time coming. Most of us read during the vSphere 4.0 Update 1 release that future vCenter versions were going to be 64-bit only. Well here we are today and VMware vCenter 4.1 is a 64-bit only installation. Likewise, that transition from moving to Windows Server 2008 R2 is now a reality because R2 is a 64-bit only Operating System (OS).
The screenshot below was taken from the vSphere Compatibilitiy Matrix Guide.
Windows 2008 R2 is ONLY compatible with:
- vSphere Client 4.1
- vCenter 4.1
- Guest OS Customization for 4.0 and 4.1
- vCenter Update Manager for Host patching ONLY. It is not supported if you are doing Guest OS updates at this time
- vCenter Converter
- VMware vCenter Orchestrator (vCO) Client and Server, versions 4.1 ONLY.
SQL server compatibiilty has declined as well for use with vCenter 4.1 64-bit. As @mattliebowitz has pointed out, there is still no support for SQL 2008 R2, only SQL 2008 Enterprise 64-bit and a few versions of SQL 2005
Update 7/23/2010
In response to Luc's comment below, here is a screenshot of a freshly installed vCenter 4.1 on Windows 2008 R2. Installation completes and it is successful. There are plenty of other blogs out there that said you can run vCenter on 2008 R2 before it was even supported.
