Quoting DABCC 

With the recent release of VMware ESX 3.5 / Virtual Center 2.5 and their Virtual Infrastructure 2.5 Client, VMware dropped 64-bit support, i.e., the ability for the VI2.5 client to be installed on a 64-bit operating system.   In fact, I wrote about this problem upon finding it a few weeks back in my post, VMware Virtual Infrastructure Client 2.5 Does Not Support 64-Bit Workstations.    

Without 64-bit support I had to find a workaround so I could access my VMware VI3 environment from my handy dandy dual 24" monitors, dual QUAD core with 8 GB of RAM and 64-Bit Windows Vista Workstation  After all, with a machine like this, there was no way I was going to run it from inside a local VM or from one of my 15" or 17" laptops.  Therefore to address this problem, my solution was to install the VI client on a 32-bit Citrix Presentation Server and to then "Publish" it to run seamlessly on my local 64-bit Vista machine.  For the most part this worked fine but I did run in to a big problem and a few nuisances. 

 

First off, because I'm running through a "remote" session, the drivers and CD-ROM were not that of my local box but were from the Citrix server I was connecting through.  This might not seem like a problem, but to me it was, i.e.,  when I wanted to mount a local CD-ROM or ISO I was forced to find out which Citrix server I was currently logged in to and then copy the 650 GB ISO to it. 

 

Terminal Services and Citrix also do a horrible job supporting multiple monitors.  In order to run it "seamlessly", I was stuck with all my VMs running on one of the two monitors.  This is not a show stopper, but it sure was annoying.

 

Annoying is doable, but I did run in to a show-stopper when I tried to console into the Citrix Presentation Server running the VI3 client.  It seems VMware does not allow a console connection to the server running the VI3 client as shown below.

Read this entire post, here.  Very good information thanks to DABCC.