Re: Vmware Workstation Pro 15 Requirements
Sheron Norsworthy
You're probably familiar with VMware Workstation; for some, it's been their personal hypervisor since its conception in 1999. Still, you might find the product intimidating after purchase, so make sure to fully understand VMware Workstation 16 Pro hardware and OS requirements, costs and the installation process.
Hypervisors are essential in the data center because they enable VMs to run multiple OSes on consolidated hardware instead of having to buy dozens of servers. Hypervisors combine workloads on a fraction of the required hardware.
But hypervisor technology isn't always readily available for your personal workloads, such as home labs, as it is in corporate data centers. In this case, Workstation 16 Pro offers an alternative hypervisor service on a Windows or Linux computer.
With a workstation, you can run multiple VMs on your PC or laptop. These VMs can run many OSes, including vSphere. Running these OSes in VMs at the same time opens up several opportunities. When software only supports Linux but your computer runs Windows, then a VM can run the Linux-based application on your Windows computer.
Other use cases for Workstation 16 Pro are to build test and demo environments with one or more OSes on a single physical VM. Workstation is also helpful if you require several VMs to build and test code because not more than one computer is needed.
Workstation 16 Pro can run on Intel- and Advanced Micro Devices-based PCs and laptops that contain processors launched as far back as 2011. Still, some processors aren't supported. You can find examples of supported and unsupported processors at VMware's documentation page.
You can run a small Windows or Linux VM within a VM that contains 2 CPU cores and 4 GB of RAM in Workstation. But it's also possible to run a vSphere VM with 8 GB of RAM and 4 CPUs on a physical host with 4 cores and 16 GB of RAM. The more VMs and the larger their size, the more resources are needed to run those VMs.
For Windows, Linux and macOS, VMware also offers VMware Workstation Player. VMware Workstation Player is a lighter version of Workstation with limited capabilities to run many VMs, such as virtual network configuration.
You can use both Workstation 16 and Fusion 12 licenses interchangeably. When you install Workstation on Windows or Fusion on macOS, you must enter a license key -- without it, both programs work as an evaluation edition for 30 days.
If you purchase either product, the same key works for either Workstation or Fusion. This means a Workstation license can unlock a Fusion installation and vice versa. These licenses also allow for usage on three personal devices.
Workstation 16 Pro installs similarly to any other Windows or Linux application; the product will run in minutes once you download and run the Workstation installer. Every feature, including networking, runs out of the box. Virtual networking might require configuration.
If your setup requires multiple networks or specific IP address ranges, Virtual Network Editor enables you to configure these network types. You can access Virtual Network Editor through the Edit menu and as a separate icon in the VMware Start Menu folder.
Workstation 16 Pro offers a New Virtual Machine Wizard available from Workstation's homepage to create new VMs. In Figure 2, the New Virtual Machine Wizard offers two ways to create a VM: Typical and Custom.
When you install mainstream OSes that contain an ISO file, such as Microsoft Windows, Linux and VMware ESXi, the straightforward way to spin up a VM is to select the Typical configuration option. Then, select the desired ISO file from the wizard interface, and let Workstation do the rest.
Workstation 16 Pro also supports containerized workloads with Kubernetes. This isn't accomplished through the GUI used to create new VMs, but with a new command-line utility, vctl, introduced with the VMware Nautilus project.
We currently have a lot of VMWare based machines but having them boot in the new system is not essential but would be nice. Note we are windows based, so Linux based virtualization tools are not an option.
I should note that we would normally want to run more than one VM at a time and internetwork them such as having a virtual AD server talking to a virtual DB server talking to a virtual client machine.
The virtualization needs to be able to run on individual machines off the network form remote/at home work if needed. So unfortunately a ESXi server solution is not possible but is a good option if it were not for that constraint.
Due to recent and planned growth we no longer want to use VMWare workstation due to the cost of a license for every new person, which is why we are looking for a free alternative despite workstation doing what we need.
Hyper-V has turned out to be the only viable option that meets our requirements.
It works nicely with VMWare Workstation machines after conversion and meets all other requirements, though does require some manual work to get NAT working so VMs can talk to each other and get the internet without affecting the rest of the network.
I did follow the link and went through the steps, on step 4 I need to mount a volume using "mountvol". when I try to mount a volume using mountvol X: \\?\Volume5593b5bd-0000-0000-0000-c0f373000000\ it keeps saying The directory is not empty. I even created a partition with 2GB and still the same message.
From here, we now have a protected mode where we can run security sensitive operations. At the time of writing, we support three capabilities that can reside here: the Local Security Authority (LSA), and Code Integrity control functions in the form of Kernel Mode Code Integrity (KMCI) and the hypervisor code integrity control itself, which is called Hypervisor Code Integrity (HVCI).
When these capabilities are handled by Trustlets in VSM, the Host OS simply communicates with them through standard channels and capabilities inside of the OS. While this Trustlet-specific communication is allowed, having malicious code or users in the Host OS attempt to read or manipulate the data in VSM will be significantly harder than on a system without this configured, providing the security benefit.
I'm still not convinced that Hyper-V is The Thing for me, even with last year's Docker trials and tribulations and I guess you won't want to switch very frequently, so rather than creating a new boot and confirming the boot default or waiting out the timeout with every boot I switch on demand in the console in admin mode by
For those who might be encountering this issue with recent changes to your computer involving Hyper-V, you'll need to disable it while using VMWare or VirtualBox. They don't work together. Windows Sandbox and WSL 2 need the Hyper-V Hypervisor on, which currently breaks VMWare. Basically, you'll need to run the following commands to enable/disable Hyper-V services on next reboot.
You'll need to reboot after that. I've written a PowerShell script that will toggle this for you and confirm it with dialog boxes. It even self-elevates to Administrator using this technique so that you can just right click and run the script to quickly change your Hyper-V mode. It could easily be modified to reboot for you as well, but I personally didn't want that to happen. Save this as hypervisor.ps1 and make sure you've run Set-ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned so that you can run PowerShell scripts.
I don't know why but version 3.6 of DG_Readiness_Tool didn't work for me.After I restarted my laptop problem still persisted.I was looking for solution and finally I came across version 3.7 of the tool and this time problem went away.Here you can find latest powershell script:
I also struggled a lot with this issue. The answers in this thread were helpful but were not enough to resolve my error. You will need to disable Hyper-V and Device guard like the other answers have suggested. More info on that can be found in here.
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\LSA\LsaCfgFlagsHKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\DeviceGuard\EnableVirtualizationBasedSecurityHKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\DeviceGuard\RequirePlatformSecurityFeatures
With the release of VMware Workstation/Player 15.5. 5 or >, we arevery excited and proud to announce support for Windows hosts withHyper-V mode enabled! As you may know, this is a joint project fromboth Microsoft and VMware
In my case I was using windows 1909, Device Guard was disabled and so was the Hyper V. While trying docker I installed and enabled wsl2. After uninstalling wsl from control panel and disabling it from powershell my vmware started working again.
If you are someone who maintains an open customized "Run as administrator" command prompt or powershell command line window at all the times you can optionally setup the following aliases / macros to simplify executing the commands mentioned by @gue22 for simply disabling hyper-v hypervisor when needing to use vmware player or workstation and then enabling it again when done.
With the above in place you just type "hpvenb" [ hypervisor enabled at boot ], "hpvdis" [ hypervisor disabled at boot ] and "bcdl" [ boot configuration devices list ] commands to execute the on, off, list commands.
Well Boys and Girls after reading through the release notes for build 17093 in the wee small hours of the night, I have found the change point that affects my VMware Workstation VM's causing them not to work, it is the Core Isolation settings under Device Security under windows security (new name for windows defender page) in settings.
By default it is turned on, however when I turned it off and restarted my pc all my VMware VM's resumed working correctly. Perhaps a by device option could be incorporated in the next build to allow us to test individual devices / Apps responses to allow the core isolation to be on or off per device or App as required .
Open Registry Editor, now Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\DeviceGuard. Add a new DWORD value named EnableVirtualizationBasedSecurity and set it to 0 to disable it.Next Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\LSA. Add a new DWORD value named LsaCfgFlags and set it to 0 to disable it.
d3342ee215