A co-worker of mine is running Workstation 11, and needs to set up a VM with Windows Server 2016. When he ran through the normal process of creating the VM and installing the OS, the installer failed out with an error. The VM would then reboot, encounter the same error, reboot, ad infinitum. (I know I should have the details on the error to help diagnose, but at the moment I don't. But please continue reading, there's more...)
From there we've done the following troubleshooting and attempted workarounds, but to no avail:
Nothing like this has ever happened before in our usage of Workstation. We've had no difficulty cloning & copying VMs which used other (earlier) versions of the Windows OS.
The obvious diagnosis is that there's some basic incompatibility such that Win2016 won't install or boot properly on Workstation 11.x, and we're pursuing an upgrade for him to work that angle.
But in the meantime, has anyone else experienced these issues with a Win2016 VM -- and if so found a workaround to get the VM to work?
Hi JDMPGH,
Unfortunately the earliest version of Workstation to support Windows 2016 as a guest was 12.5 (see attached document)
In this case support likely means run and encountering BSOD is normal. Later releases of VMware Workstation often include code patches to allow certain guest OS‘s to run with issues.
Another option depending on the requirement to simultaneous workloads is to explore using VMware Player.
Kind regards.
Hi JDMPGH,
Unfortunately the earliest version of Workstation to support Windows 2016 as a guest was 12.5 (see attached document)
In this case support likely means run and encountering BSOD is normal. Later releases of VMware Workstation often include code patches to allow certain guest OS‘s to run with issues.
Another option depending on the requirement to simultaneous workloads is to explore using VMware Player.
Kind regards.