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On most of my VM's the CPU is setup as ACPI Uniprocessor (see below)enter image description here. Some of my VM's are setup as MPS Uniprocessor. I need to change it to ACPI, so I can upgrade to Server 2008. How to I change it?

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Are these machines all the same virtual machine version? I believe version 7 is current. – EEAA Jul 7 '11 at 19:31
They are both hardware version 4 – IT_Fixr Jul 7 '11 at 19:40
All my VM's are set to hardware Version 4 – IT_Fixr Jul 7 '11 at 19:40
Do I have to replace the HAL.dll, get a driver or what can I do? When I try "update driver" it does not give me the choice for ACPI.. – IT_Fixr Jul 7 '11 at 19:42
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Frankly, I haven't a clue. I would recommend, though, getting your machines updated to version 7. There are several very nice additions that you'll get. – EEAA Jul 7 '11 at 19:45
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This isn't a VMWare ESX issue at all, this is purely down to Windows and your current hardware platform and the Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) chosen during the initial install of Windows.

With Windows 2003 the HAL type is a choice made forever (you can make minor changes after this point, sometimes, but really consider this a decision that is locked down for the life of the system at this point) during the install process - by the installer itself if you don't specify one. This is documented by Microsoft here and here.

As I recall, there is no supported way to change the HAL type in the way you want after install, so you may need to do a clean install and migrate data that way. Frankly, even if there is some clever hack that I've missed, a clean install and migration is the only way I'd produce a result I would personally trust from this starting point.

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I have seen tricks back in the Windows 2000 days to change the HAL, but doing them tended to cause problems. A clean install is the way to go. – Zoredache Jul 7 '11 at 21:33
I ended up doing repair install and choosing F5 -> ACPI Multiprocessor PC and it works fine! Since this is ONLY an intranet IIS Test machine, I feel safe doing this. Let's see how stable it is.. – IT_Fixr Jul 7 '11 at 21:58
@Zoredache - I helped write the documentation for most of the NT4 and Windows 2000 HAL changing tricks for Microsoft... it's certainly possible. Just not, as you say, likely to work without problems. – RobM Jul 7 '11 at 22:15
@IT_Fixr - glad its working for you but I agree with you about only using this approach for test machines. There's no way in hell I'd do this on a live 'production' machine... – RobM Jul 7 '11 at 22:16
I looked at our company KDB and this method has been proven on many machines. – IT_Fixr Jul 7 '11 at 23:11
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