ender_'s Posts

Nested virtualisation support depends on Microsoft adding support for that for 3rd party hypervisors – this is currently not supported yet (even Hyper-V only gained nested virt support on AMD CPUs with Server 2022 and Windows 11).

Workstation 15 does not officially support Windows 11 hosts, and Intel's 12th gen CPUs are currently not officially supported by any version of Workstation (due to the performance/efficiency cores split).

Is this a PC/SC (smart) card reader or memory card reader? If it's a smart card reader, and you'd like to share a smart card with a VM, there are two ways to do it – you can have VMWare emulate a card reader and access the smart card on the host, this allows the card to be used both on the host, and in guest, but may be incompatible with some cards. You can do this by selecting VM → Removable devices → Shared card reader name → Connect. The other way is to connect the USB smart card device to the guest – in this case the card reader (and any inserted card) will not be usable in your host OS. To do this, go to VM → Removable devices → card reader name (make sure you don't select the "Shared" one) → Connect. Note that in some laptops the card reader is only powered on when you insert a card – you can often control this in BIOS setup, but if there's no setting for this, you'll have to insert a card before you'll be able to connect the card reader to a VM.

While you can mask the CPUID features, that only affects what CPUID reports – it won't prevent the applications from (successfully) executing these instructions inside the VM, as long as the host CPU supports them. The only way to test this properly is on a CPU that doesn't support the instructions, or by using an emulator such as Bochs.

While Windows 11 did add nested virt support for Hyper-V, that's only available for Hyper-V VMs – VMWare does not currently support nested virt when using Hyper-V API regardless of the CPU used (and from what I understand, this is a limitation of the API itself).

What kind of virtual disk does your VM use? There are some complaints that the VMWare's NVMe emulation is much slower than SCSI – if that's the case, try switching the disk to SCSI. This is slightly more involved – make a backup copy of the VM first, in case anything goes wrong. Then start by adding a second hard drive to the VM, and choose the type as SCSI. It doesn't matter how big the disk is, you just need it temporarily. Exit VMWare, and open the .vmx file from your VM in Notepad. Search for line that says scsi0.virtualDev = "lsisas1068" and change it to scsi0.virtualDev = "pvscsi". Now run VMWare again, boot the VM, and check in Device Manager that you see "VMWare Paravirtual SCSI" under Storage Controllers. If it's not there (or if it has a  or question mark), reinstall VMWare Tools. Shut down the VM, exit VMWare, and open .vmx in Notepad again. Change the lines nvme0.present = "TRUE" and nvme0:0.present = "TRUE" to both say FALSE, and copy the disk file name from nvme0:0.fileName = "Windows 11 x64-000002.vmdk" to the scsi0:0.fileName line. Save the .vmx, run VMWare again, and in Settings check that you now only see a SCSI hard drive. Boot the VM, and check if disk performance is better now.

Disk encryption slows down everything. Workstation 16.2.4 does support a mode where adding TPM doesn't require you to fully encrypt the VM, but it has some disadvantages (you can't ever move that VM to another computer, because parts of the VM remain encrypted, and there is no way to get the decryption key), and you need to edit the .vmx file manually to enable it. If you want to run Windows 11 guests, your best bet is to upgrade to current Workstation Technical Preview, which has much better support for TPM and Windows 11.

VM Settings → USB Controller → Show all USB input devices, then once the VM is running, use the VM → Removable Devices menu to connect your mouse. Note that you will not be able to move your mouse cursor out of the VM once you do this.

I'm not sure about Player, but on Pro you can enable an option to allow all available USB devices to be connected to the guest (by default HID devices like keyboards and mice are excluded), however if you do that, you won't be able to use your mouse on the host at all while the VM is running.