Support for Windows 11 Guest OS, VMware Workstation Player

[JackOatmon]

Does anyone know VMWare's plans for support of Windows 11 as a Guest OS (oh, and as a host OS too)?

There are a whole list of hardware requirements for Windows 11, and so I'm wondering if and how VMWare plans to address these?  Will Windows 11 be usable in VMWare Workstation Player?  Will Workstation Pro be required in order to create a Windows 11 Guest?

Required:

• Processor (must emulate a processor that implements the right instructions)
• RAM (yeah)
• Storage (yeah)
• UEFI 
• TPM 2.0
• DirectX 12 with WDDM 2.0 driver

Plus a whole list of "Feature Specific" items.

See microsoft.com/en-us/windows-11-specifications

[DirectorOfBats]

Second your question, I searched the wiki/community/knowledge base but couldn't find any ETA to when this will be available.

[bluefirestorm · Accepted solution]

The SVGA 3D driver has been on the WDDM for a number of years. The DX12 is not a minimum requirement for Windows 11. The DX12 is only required for gaming that will use the direct to GPU transfer from NVMe storage, bypassing the CPU and thus making games load faster.

Ran the latest PC Health Check app (https://aka.ms/GetPCHealthCheckApp) on a Windows 10 VM with UEFI, secure boot enabled, virtual TPM2.0 on Workstation Pro 15.5.7 (therefore only has DX10.1) on a Intel Coffee Lake CPU host, it passed the Windows 11 check. The latest version of the PC Health Check app will give more details as to why a PC (physical or virtual) fails the Windows 11 requirements.

UEFI, secure boot, virtual TPM has been available since version 14. Adding a virtual TPM requires the VM to be encrypted. The sticky situation is that encrypting the VM also encrypts the virtual disks which I think is the sticky situation that needs to be resolved. Don't know how VM encryption is done right now on Workstation Player.

[RaSystemlord]

Thanks for the info! Very interesting.

If not obvious - Win 11 VMs seem to continue working AND updating AND with both Dev&Beta content. I have several of them, mostly installed from ISO (with a 3rd party ISO-creator from Microsoft content, prior to Microsoft's own ISOs). My VMware Workstation Player version is 16.1. Mostly I run them on an old i7 (probably 2nd generation and thus very far from being supported in official Win 11) based workstation with Kubuntu 2020.04.2 LTS. They work fine and a well-balanced workstation isn't particularly slow.

Surprisingly, I have had to fight OFF my Win 10 computer updates into Win 11. This has something to do with the Insider program and Microsoft login, which you need to use in order to get Win 11 in the first place and even install it. Even a new Win10 install started to Upgrade into Win 11 in the middle of the install without a cancel option. I guess, having separate Microsoft logins (one for normal Win10 use&else, and one for Win 11 related) would have solved the problem.

[JackOatmon]

I've been running an "Insider Preview" of Win 11 and have been getting updates through that channel.  I'm not worried that it works, I'm concerned that any Win 11 guest won't get security updates after General Availability -- due to the lack of vTPM.

[JackOatmon]

We use VMWare Workstation for our various development activities and have done so for quite a while.  The Win 11 TPM requirement is my key concern, and since we use Player, I don't even see a way to turn on encryption of the virtual disks.  We can move to Pro, but have been avoiding the extra cost if it wasn't needed.

I hope that the issue with drive encryption is resolved, but I suspect as the requirement for TPM becomes more apparent, VMWare will remove drive encryption as a prerequisite for enabling vTPM.

[bluefirestorm]

I must add currently VMware Player can open encrypted VMs created from Workstation Pro.

So if you would like to give it a whirl, you can download a Workstation Pro 30 day evaluation. Player is also installed. When the 30 day eval expires, the Pro UI will not be able to start any VM. VMware Player still can run the VM(s).

Given that encrypted VMs also encrypts the virtual disks, I would suggest that the virtual disk(s) of the VM have preallocated storage. This is one other feature Player can't do (create preallocated virtual disks). Haven't tried using encrypted virtual disks without preallocation myself, but my thinking is that given encryption would not allow for contiguous bytes of zeroes, it would be impossible to shrink encrypted virtual disks and these would keep on growing without preallocation.

[RaSystemlord]

@bluefirestorm 

What do you mean by "shrink"? Do you mean a) Allocated space within VM, even if deleted, will never be released to the VM-use (like happens if you have even a single Snapshot, nothing is really deleted) OR b) You cannot use manual "shrink" command, which is basically only needed when you revamp your VM (or rather its copy) to a new use scenario?

The item a) has a huge meaning. b) only in limited cases. Pre-allocated space is a huge disk spender anyway, if you are dealing with lots of data - also files like 150 GB are not nice to deal with.

[bluefirestorm]

I am not talking about snapshots. I am not talking about deleting VMs.

If the VM virtual disk is not preallocated, the actual storage space occupied can be smaller. Example, VM OS sees 300GB (virtual) disk but the VMDKs occupies on 90GB on the host. On Workstation Pro there are functions to defrag and compress the virtual disk. Going back to the example, the compress might make it occupy 85GB instead of the previous 90GB. But generally this compress works with punching zeroes into the virtual disk (such as using sdelete in Windows or dd a file with /dev/zero on Linux) from within the VM before doing the compress.

Assuming you punch zeroes into the virtual disk inside the VM, the encrypted VMDKs on the host by definition would mean the contiguous zeroes would also be encrypted (which will make it non-zero), and thus compression may not work. It might even get into a situation that it would grow larger than 300GB in the example assuming the encryption avoids reusing host storage space to avoid showing a pattern in the encryption.

As I said, I haven't tried using non-preallocated virtual disk with encrypted VMs.

[RaSystemlord]

I was not discussing Snapshots primarily either - I made a COMPARISON how Snapshots work to further clarify my meaning.

I think you answered my question so that only compress and shrink are affected. This does not matter, which was my point, I would say normally, in a heavy use situation. Example from my way:

- create 80 GB C:\ to host all the software & its own data what is best left to C:

- create 150 GB (or larger, it doesn't matter much, because extending is trivial to the second disk) another virtual-disk for data. Put ALL the user data there.

- use non-preallocated, in slices

In this scenario, you never really need to shink anything, because disk space allocation is what you ACTUALLY use. If you delete something, like 5 GB of software delivery data, your VM OS will see that as free space, which you can reuse. You don't need to compress either, because no heavy user has nothing else than SDDs, where disk fragmentation is a non-issue.

It's good that you mentioned the limitations, but I was curious if that affects my workflow - which I would recommend in a normal high-use case. Like I said, if you revamp the VM to some other purpose, then compress/shrinking might be required (a longer discussion why really).

[RaSystemlord]

Anyway, since this Windows 11 version 

22463.1000.210917-1503.RS_PRERELEASE_CLIENTMULTI_X64FRE_EN-US.ISO

Windows 11 does not install on VMware Player, if certain requirements are not met.

Not sure what the exact requirements are for a VMware computer since News about this are not explicit. It was good to test it, though. Impressions were:

- still, if you want to Shut it Down, you have to press Start Button

- computer management is changed to be more abstract, Settings is moved to somewhere else. Otherwise, it is the same: you have Computer Management icon and 20 other icons where you do computer management

- HD screens, typical for last 10 years, have more width than height. The great idea of Windows 11 desktop was to make the usable height even smaller by putting menus in the bottom. Rumors are that you cannot affect this at all. Nice, it keeps the desktop much consistent between users. You can of course change all your applications not to require such height, over 1000 pixels - that is what software companies are for.

- Icons are now much better. The great idea of Windows 10 was to introduce elementary-school-level-black-and-white icons. Now they are SO MUCH better in Windows 11, because they use colors in them. Great development! However, even Ancient Egypt hieroglyphs had colors and thus it is not exactly a new development for icons.

The great thing is that VMware Player  and sometimes the computer, does not hang when shutting down Windows 11 system, like it sometimes does when using Windows 10 (discussed in length elsewhere on this Forum). But wait for the final version of Windows 11! I don't, because it doesn't run on a computer with very decent performance.

[JonathanMcEvoy]

Is there going to be support for Windows 11 and is VMware Workstation Player going to continue to get a big software update that will enable support for Windows 11?

[RaSystemlord]

@JonathanMcEvoy  . That's a very good question.

First, what are really the requirements for that. TPM is only one thing. Installing from ISO is yet another thing and what does it mean that not all Upgrades are possible. Just today, it was said "Automatic Updates" are not possible if you install from ISO - who cares? Companies don't use it anyway, or is a company update-policy considered as Automatic as well, since that is limited Automation for updating? If there is no TPM on the HOST, does it matter if VMware has a virtual TPM? Does the Host processor matter if VM has TPM?

There is a myriad of questions around and Microsoft stories just change weekly and nowadays appear to change daily.

[JonathanMcEvoy]

Is VMware Workstation Player not going to be discontinued and will it always be used in the future?

[scott28tt]

The Player and Pro construct for Workstation was added to Fusion (the product for MacOS) in the current release, I see no reason for a Player option to disappear.

[wila]

Hi,

---

@JonathanMcEvoy wrote:

Is there going to be support for Windows 11 and is VMware Workstation Player going to continue to get a big software update that will enable support for Windows 11?

---

Yes, there will be support for Windows 11 and VMware is committed to support for Windows 11.
But beware that Windows 11 changes are very much still in motion even with the release date is close by. Microsoft is changing the requirements pretty ad hoc at this moment and VMware has to play catch up with their changes.

more details here: https://www.reddit.com/r/vmware/comments/pxyttk/future_of_desktop_hypervisors_from_vmware/

FWIW, redditor mikeroySoft answering down there is the Fusion/Workstation product manager.

--
Wil

[RaSystemlord]

@wila 

"But beware that Windows 11 changes are very much still in motion even with the release date is close by. Microsoft is changing the requirements pretty ad hoc at this moment and VMware has to play catch up with their changes."

That was exactly what I meant with some of my posts. For instance, the matter that Windows 11 refused to install a VMware computer, from the latest ISO, yesterday, is against what Microsoft has said in the past, in some of their announcements. It was complaining about hardware requirements not been met. There is nothing wrong in the performance of my workstation Host. 

[JonathanMcEvoy]

Is there going to be a VMware Workstation Player 17 which will give support for Windows 11 and will we be able to install Windows 11 on VMware Player?

[BlackGator]

On my 2017 vintage 4-core Xeon machine running workstation 15.5.7, my experience with Windows 11 so far is that the preview releases - which I believe have much relaxed hardware requirements - have installed easily from clean Windows 10 guests.

However now the full release of Windows 11 is available, the situation is quite different, now that the full hardware requirements must be fulfilled. I have tried a clean install onto a new virgin guest, but failed. Secondly I have tried a clean install of a Windows 10 guest with bitlocker encryption and TPM 2.0 support - now the Windows 11 installer complains that "The processor isn't suported for this version of Windows".

In my view this is a VmWare issue that ts virtual processor in Workstation 15.5.x does not emulate the extra machine instructions that Microsoft demands ( cynics view is that MS is pushing for more PC sales to ramp up its sales of Windows 11).

So, point 1 - come on VMWare, step up your game and produce the new machine instruction emulations.

By the way, having initialized my clean W10 guest with Bitlocker encryption, I now have to supply the encryption password every time I want to start the guest.

So, point 2  - VMWare, is that in similar fashion to the seamless integration of TPM 2.0 on a physical machine, Workstation should also make the guest startup free of having to enter encryption password.

[RaSystemlord]

@BlackGator 
You are right, but I already answered this question in length, a week ago, in the thread mentioned below. The answer is based on actual testing last weekend.

TPM Module in Workstation 16 (non-pro)

To my surprise, nobody has even commented on this, I thought this was of interest? The thread gives a perfect way to install Windows 11 on any computer using Microsoft delivered official ISO file, published Oct-5-2021 ... which is exactly the preferred way for VMware install. Even Updates are working - which I have observed during this week.

The contents of the link gives also other ways, perhaps preferred in some cases.

Please comment this on that thread.