Just wished to share my experience contacting support for a bug in the Workstation Pro 14.1.2 installer.
Apparently, the installer fails to update a driver, which prevents the VMWare authorization service to start. This happens if the installation runs as an update procedure from after starting Workstation. The remedy is run the installation program again. I ran it as an Admin but that most likely is unnecessary as the credentials will be elevated by Windows anyhow.
The reason I am reporting the story is because the support person said a few things that were totally uncalled for:
(1) he stopped me when reporting the specific message from the Windows Application Log; That message pointed to the driver mismatch issue;
(2) he 'blamed' windows for the failure to start indicating the windows device management is faulty and i should run Workstation as an admin;
(3) he suggested I go track the reason why Windows is 'misbehaving'.
He also suggested I do a reinstall, which, luckily, I tried first.
Now what's the problem with this?
Two major ones:
(a) I could have gone down the path of searching for a non-existing problem in Windows and wasted precious hours with elevated frustration;
(b) ignoring the culprit prevents VMWare from seeing and correcting bugs.
Clearly, installing an update when Workstation is running is more complex and, in this case, failed. I trust the developers at VMWare would appreciate knowing of such failures. With the support person I encountered, their chances of getting valuable information diminishes.
I hope this report help others and VMware.
Workstation is a great product. Thank you!
David
Thanks for the feedback David, we appreciate it.
We'll forward this along to the engineering team.
Did you have a support case number we can reference?
Did they understand that the older version (14.1.1) was working fine under Windows v1803 and that the software didn't stop functioning until you tried to apply the update? How did they explain why this happened? I would of liked to have seen release notes on the new version before it tried to update the software. It would have been nice to review what it was suppose to do instead of just being given to option to install the update.
My faith in VMWare has been greatly challenged by this problem and their failure to accept and wrong doing.