I’ve been installing a Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 VM for filesharing in my VMware Lab Manager Environment. Because it is a Virtual Machine, I need to install the VMware Tools.

However, I ran into a problem while trying to launch the installer (setup.exe) from the command prompt

the subsystem needed to support the image type is not present

After some googling I found only a single hit on this problem: “More PowerShell Remoting“. David Clarke posted the solution:

WoW64

Obviously I’m missing something. WoW64 support for 32 bit applications is now an optional feature in Server Core and isn’t installed by default. I also have the 32-bit .Net Frameworks installed so I figure I might as well include support for that. And a restart is required.

C:\Users\dave>start /w ocsetup ServerCore-WOW64

After running the above command to install WoW64 and rebooting, the VMware Tools install properly. Please be advised that using the (enhanced) VMXNet adapter will cause all sorts of installation problems, so I used the e1000 vNIC.