Vmware Workstation Enhanced Keyboard Driver
Roseanne Gennett
The driver is installed in my host, and does hook into the standard keyboard driver chain. This does sound a little scary to me, knowing Microsoft's habit to change Windows internals at will and not caring too much wether competing products are broken or not. So if the driver doesn't do any good for me, I'd rather not install it.
The docs do say, thet the driver does "somehow" do "something" good for foreign language keyboards. Well, I have a foreign language keyboard (German), in fact I have plenty of them (very basic ones as well as "Multimedia" keyboards with tons of special keys, mainly made by Microsoft and Logitech, but also other brands), and I have never noticed any difference between hosts with and without the Enhanced Keyboard Driver.
> and what kind of malfunction I will experience if I don't install it?
I do not install the "enhanced keyboard driver" since it was added. This driver requires a reboot after install and I also do not know what it really is good for.
I recommend not to install it - if you ever come across a function that requires this driver you can install it later.
In other words - dont worry - do nothing !
Ulli
Because it processes raw keyboard input as soon as possible, the enhanced virtual keyboard feature also offers security improvements by bypassing Windows keystroke processing and any malware that is not already at a lower layer. When you use the enhanced virtual keyboard feature, only the guest operating system acts when you press Ctrl+Alt+Delete
Honestly, I have never understood exactly what concrete benefits the so-called "enhanced keyboard driver" produces, at least I have not found any particularly relevant ones that would justify its installation. Never installed and will continue not to install "that driver".
After working for a few minutes (< 5min), the keyboard (*not* the enhanced keyboard driver) just stopped working in an Ubuntu 22.04 guest OS. Host is Windows 11 Pro on Dell XPS 15. This happened to a colleague of mine, too, so it's unlikely to be tied to a particular user's configuration (though we do have the same model host machines).
Same issues, input seems to suddenly stop on the VM but network connectivity continues working. I had several Linux installs just hang today in the Workstation window, while I could ssh into them and try to debug within. They seemed to be running just fine otherwise. Only way I could get the input back was to restart the VM. Completely uninstalled 17.5.5 and restarted the OS (Win11, btw). Reinstalled 17.0.2, skipping the enhanced kb driver, and things have been flawlessly stable since. I guess I'll wait for the 17.5.1 build
WOW unbelievable 17.5.0 broke all if my VMs. I tried reinstalling like four times, tried to remove the keyboard driver but the issue is not just the keyboard. Everything stops and freezes, all my Linux VMs are dead. Is there an official fix form VMware or all is downhill now with Boradcom? Pretty sad and disappointing.
The VMware Enhanced Keyboard Driver is required if you are using a keyboard with your virtual machine. It helps users have a better experience. This post from MiniTool tells you how to download and install VMware enhanced keyboard driver.
To use the enhanced virtual keyboard functionality in a virtual machine, you must have the VMware enhanced keyboard driver installed on the Windows host system. If you did not install the VMware enhanced keyboard driver when you initially installed or upgraded Workstation, you can install it by running the Workstation Pro installer in program maintenance mode.
After installing VMware Player and enabling the enhanced keyboard driver, the keyboard will not work (Bluetooth or USB). Device Manager will show one or more devices with an exclamation mark under Human Interface Devices. How to fix the enhanced keyboard driver issue? Here are the steps:
Most of us hypervisor managers are used to the idea of needing to install additional guest OS drivers for basic functionality, like networking support. But a keyboard is a keyboard. So why do you need the VMware Enhanced Keyboard Driver? What does it even do?
When I install the VMWare I remember I do not use the enhanced keyboard driver as well, so I think enhanced keyboard driver is not relevant to the problem. Therefore I have decide to reinstall just the VMWare 17.0.0 and it does not occur anymore. I think the problem is due to 17.5 then.
Having read through multiple FAQ's on the VMWare KB, I have tried adding USB support to the .vmx file for HID keyboard drivers and then using a USB keyboard plugged in both before (and after) the Guest VM was powered up, but neither made any difference.
I also noticed that while the cursor moves to the target which has to be cilcked when my vmware worstation window is not focused, it even doesn't do that when i WinActivate the vmware workstation window first.
Yes, it is a software install. I am a QA Engineer and am testing our installation. For what i think are understandable reasons, we want to make sure that in our tests we cover scenarios as close to the reality as possible and since nobody really deactivates UAC and it does matter to the installer, if it is deactivated or not, we decided to work around it in our tests. However in this particular use case, i think, it is not really about automating the UAC, it is just an example. It is about the sudden impossibility to automate any click or key send from the host to a guest system in vmware workstation 14 pro, which works perfectly on virtualbox. I really hope that somebody else gas experienced such an issue and has a workaround for it.
I tried today to use VMware Workstation 12(the previous version) and it works like a charm. I thought that it might be the enhanced keyboard driver which vmware installs, but it is not the reason. I will stick with VMware Workstation 12 for now in the hope, that somebody will maybe shed some light what is going on and i will also post on the vmware forum.
- Many organizations are using either Windows Hyper-V or VMware to run their virtual machines. I'm in the VMware website where I can download for free the Workstation 16 Player. I'm going to download and save the application, then run the installation. You need to make sure that virtualization is turned on in your UEFI or BIOS. VMware makes an enterprise product called ESXi. And although the workstation is not going to be in production use, you're going to find that it's a great training tool for sysadmins who want to break into the business. VMware Player has completed and now I'll run the installation. (computer chimes) Installation wizard comes up and I'll choose to accept the license agreement and run through the installation. It's a good idea to install the enhanced keyboard driver and also make sure the add VMware Workstation console tools and click next. It's up to you. If you'd like to join the VMware customer experience and check for product updates. Updates are always a good idea due to security issues. And if you want to have shortcuts installed you can do that. And I'm going to run the installation. You may get prompted to reboot the computer either during the installation or afterwards, so just be prepared. And I'll click finish, if you have a license key, you can choose that. Otherwise, just go ahead and click, finish and restart as prompted. After restarting, I can go ahead and double click on the VMware Workstation Player. And you can enter your license or choose for non-commercial use. We're just using this for demonstration purposes and not actually using it for commercial use, so we can go ahead and continue by clicking on create a new virtual machine. With Hyper-V you can't use the DVD in the DVD drive, You can only use an ISO file. However, with VMware Workstation, you can. So I'll go ahead and click on installer disc and browse to my ISO. Since I don't have one in my drive but if I did have an installation disc in there then I could use that. I'll select my ISO and click next. Now, if I have a product key, I can paste it in here. I can also choose the version to install. If it has multiple versions on that ISO. I'm going to choose Windows 10 Pro. And then we want to put in our password. Otherwise it will prompt us for the password later on, and we can also enter what name we'd like to use to log in. Now we can enter the virtual machine name as well as the location. I'm going to choose the defaults on both and click next. Next we see the maximum disc size. So you're probably going to want to take a look and see what kind of free space you have. So I have around 95 gigs free. So I'm going to say to not use more than 40 gigabytes, which should be enough to install Windows along with any updates it needs. Another option you don't have with Hyper-V, but you do have with VMware is to store the virtual disc as either a single file or multiple files. And that allows you to make it easier to move. If you choose the multiple file option when you'd like to go to another computer. It does reduce performance however, so I'm just going to choose the single file. Since I'm not going to use this for commercial purposes. Make sure the box is checked for power on this virtual machine after creation if you'd like that and click on customize hardware if you'd like to make any changes, such as by default it's going to use two gigabytes of RAM and you can check the free amount of RAM you have in your task manager to decide how much RAM you'd like to use. I've got eight gigs of RAM available. I'm going to choose to use three, and then under processors you can go ahead and choose whatever the amount you'd like. I typically like to go with four. Now I know I don't have 32 processors. So it'll just ignore that if I choose that. I don't recommend changing anything to the virtualization engine, unless you get an error when you try to start up the virtual machine. If you do, look up the error and it will typically tell you when you do a search, which box you need to change here under virtualization engine, in order to clear that error and get the virtual machine started. Another thing to keep in mind would be the network adapter. By default, it's set to NAT, and that means it's used to share the host's IP address. If you'd like to connect directly to a physical network you can choose the bridged option or you can choose the host only, which is a private network. That's just going to be shared with the host. So it's just going to be communication between your virtual machine and the host. And that's a really good way to go if you don't want to run Windows updates because it's not going to be able to get out to the internet and you could choose a custom one as well. I'm going to choose the host only. I can always go out to the internet later and click close and now click finish. It's creating the disc, and when it's done, it's going to install Windows on my virtual machine, and then it's going to power it up. I'm now getting the option just to go ahead and run the installation wizard and noticed even though I chose Professional it went ahead and did the Enterprise installation instead. So keep that in mind that just because you choose a specific OS doesn't mean it's going to actually use it. It's now running through the Windows installation and will complete shortly. Installation times will vary. But in this particular case, it took roughly 10 minutes with eight gigabytes of RAM on the host, three for the virtual machine using an SSD drive. And now it's logging in because I went ahead and said for it to auto start and log in. The server has restarted and can now be used for testing and preparing for work as a sysadmin.
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