Migrating virtual (VMWare) workstations from AMD to Intel hardware

You might well be better off creating it as a full-stack install including the OS and all dependencies, on an OS that you know it works well under. Then let the end user decide if they want to install it standalone or as a VM guest on KVM, VMWare, Xen, or whatever. The only thing you'd gain over this with a KVM image is some amount of hardware-agnosticity, but there are still potential pitfalls there as you've pointed out, and the site would have to be willing and able to maintain a KVM host in addition to your application and its OS.

EDIT: To respond to your reformulated question, I think you've still go to leave this stuff to the sites -- VM guests, by design, cannot control how networking is set up on the host. You can certainly provide documentation and instructions for doing this in the simplest or most effective way, but that may vary from site to site. No matter what you do, if you distribute this as a VM image or appliance, the site will have to effectively set up and maintain a VM host that is specifically configured to work on their network.

VMware Workstation 7 doesn't support nested hvm. You should try VMware Workstation 8 or 9.

Edit the virtual machine and modify the processor options. In the Virtualization engine , check "Virtualize Intel-x/EPT or AMD-V/RVI"。

If you are using VMware Workstation 8, you should also modify the .vmx file of the vm, add a new line : vhv.enable = "TRUE" You can refer to this. http://communities.vmware.com/community/vmtn/bestpractices/nested