VMware Workstation Player (formerly known as Player Pro) is a desktop hypervisor application that delivers local virtualization features and is available for free for personal use. A Commercial License can be applied to enable Workstation Player to run Restricted Virtual Machines created by VMware Workstation Pro and Fusion Pro.
VMware Workstation Player is free for personal, non-commercial use (business and nonprofit use is considered commercial use). If you would like to learn about virtual machines or use them at home, you are welcome to use VMware Workstation Player for free. Students and faculty of accredited educational institutions can use VMware Workstation Player for free if they are members of the VMware Academic Program.
No. VMware Workstation Player is not designed to co-install with other VMware products. If an installation of VMware Workstation Pro or VMware Server is detected on a machine where Workstation Player is being installed, the Workstation Player installation will display an error message and abort. However, if you purchase and install Workstation Pro, a version of Workstation Player that will work is included with your purchase.
VMware Workstation Player is free for personal, non-commercial use (business and nonprofit use is considered commercial use). If you would like to learn about virtual machines or use them at home, you are welcome to use VMware Workstation Player for free. Students and faculty of accredited educational institutions can use VMware Workstation Player for free if they are members of the VMware Academic Program.
VMware Workstation Pro works by creating fully isolated, secure virtual machines that encapsulate an operating system and its applications. The VMware virtualization layer maps the physical hardware resources to the virtual machine's resources, so each virtual machine has its own CPU, memory, disks, and I/O devices, and is the full equivalent of a standard x86 machine. VMware Workstation Pro installs onto the host operating system and provides broad hardware support by inheriting device support from the host.
IMPORTANT: When you install a new version of Workstation, the previous version will be uninstalled from your system. Therefore, we recommend that you proceed with the upgrade only if you have a new license key. Your existing virtual machines will not be affected.
VMware Workstation Player is an ideal utility for running a single virtual machine on a Windows or Linux PC. Organizations use Workstation Player to deliver managed corporate desktops, while students and educators use it for learning and training.
I just installed VMWare Workstation on a Win 8 laptop, and created bare Win XP and Win 7 VMs. They worked fine, but after a Win 8 crash this morning I'm no longer able to access them. When I click on the virtual machine, it sits for a few seconds then I get a popup:
But there's a number of places we check for config settings, so if you check the top of a vmware.log file for one of your VMs and search for all the lines that contain "DICT ---" it should list them all, as well as all the options it picked up from them so you can double-check that it worked.
Today we are excited to announce the immediate availability of the vSphere Virtual Machine Service (VM Service). Included in the vSphere 7 Update 2a release, the VM Service enables Kubernetes-native provisioning and management of virtual machines, for developers running modern apps on vSphere with Tanzu. The VM Service allows a developer (or any DevOps, platform operations, or Kubernetes user) to deploy and manage virtual machines using Kubernetes standard APIs, while simultaneously allowing the IT administrator to govern resource consumption and service availability.
We currently package our virtual machines for four different virtualization software options: VMWare, Hyper-V (Gen2), VirtualBox, and Parallels.These virtual machines contain an evaluation version of Windows that expires on the date posted. If the evaluation period expires, the desktop background will turn black, you will see a persistent desktop notification indicating that the system is not genuine, and the PC will shut down every hour.
Last, auditability has had an enormous impact on our guidance, in that many security scanning tools look for specific parameters to be set for ESXi and for virtual machines. If our guidance does not have references to these parameters it leads to questions, support cases, and requests to reinstate them from customers and partners. However, many of the parameters that are checked do not currently exist in vSphere, and most of those that do exist either default to the guidance, or require site-specific information to configure (NTP servers, syslog servers, etc.).
This general approach will start to be reflected in VMware products as well as documentation and other guidance from VMware. The vSphere Cluster Services (vCLS) agent virtual machines are a good example of this. Because they operate solely on vSphere 7 and newer they can rely on the secure product defaults. As such, those agent virtual machines only set parameters that positively affect security beyond the defaults.
Scans for this parameter should not generate findings if the parameter is found and set to TRUE, or the parameter is omitted and using the default for virtual machines which always run in vSphere 7 environments.
This parameter controls the ability to copy & paste information into a guest workload using the VMware vSphere virtual machine console. This control has no effect on in-guest console connections such as that with Microsoft Remote Desktop Connection.
This parameter controls the ability for in-guest users to trigger a process to reclaim disk space at the virtual disk (VMDK) level. This process can create a denial-of-service condition if used inappropriately.
This parameter controls the ability for in-guest users to trigger a process to wipe disk space at the virtual disk (VMDK) level. This process can create a denial-of-service condition if used inappropriately. Software disk wiping is also inappropriate for use on modern flash memory storage.
Scans for this parameter should not generate findings if the parameter is found and set to FALSE, or the parameter is omitted and using the default for virtual machines which always run in vSphere 7 environments.
This parameter controls how many older versions of a virtual machine log file should be kept with the virtual machine, in order to balance preserving information versus the risks of uncontrolled growth on disk.
This parameter disables the 3D functionality available in the virtual machine graphics adapters to reduce potential attack surface for workloads that do not require 3D. It is also exposed as a checkbox in the virtual machine configuration UI.
This parameter controls how many simultaneous connections are allowed to the VMware vSphere virtual machine console. This control has no effect on in-guest console connections such as that with Microsoft Remote Desktop Connection. Please note that virtual machine console connections proxied through vCenter Server (the default in vSphere 7) will warn of simultaneous connections, so setting this higher can help compensate for disconnected sessions counting towards the total, or denial-of-service effects from having the number set low.
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