VMware Workstation Pro

About VMware Workstation Pro

Workstation runs whole guest systems as ordinary windows on the desktop. Each one gets its own virtual processor allocation, memory, disks, network adapters and devices, and behaves as a real machine as far as anything running inside it is concerned. That makes it the standard way to test software against several environments without owning several machines.

Snapshots are the feature that changes how people work. The state of a running guest is captured in seconds and can be returned to at any point afterwards, and snapshots branch into a tree so several different paths from the same starting point can be kept side by side. Anything destructive becomes safe, because the way back is one menu item.

Virtual networking goes well beyond a shared connection. Guests can be bridged onto the physical network with their own address, put behind address translation, isolated on a host only segment, or wired into custom segments that connect a group of guests to each other and nothing else. That is enough to build a small multi machine environment on a single workstation.

The rest is the practical tooling: linked and full clones for spinning up copies without duplicating disk space, shared folders between host and guest, drag and drop and clipboard sharing, USB device passthrough, graphics acceleration inside the guest, and an encrypted virtual machine option for anything that should not be readable from the host file system.

What is included in this build

• Run several complete guest systems simultaneously as desktop windows
• Snapshot tree with branching states and instant return to any captured point
• Linked and full cloning for fast duplication without wasting disk space
• Bridged, address translated, host only and custom virtual network segments
• USB device passthrough and graphics acceleration inside the guest
• Shared folders, clipboard sharing and drag and drop between host and guest
• Encrypted virtual machines with a restricted access option
• Import and export of virtual machines through the standard appliance format

Changed in version 17.6.2

• Improved graphics acceleration performance inside guests
• Better handling of nested virtualisation on current processors
• Faster snapshot creation on machines with very large virtual disks
• Updated virtual hardware version with additional device support
• Reduced host memory pressure when several guests are suspended

Installation walkthrough

These steps assume a clean machine. If a previous release of the same application is present, deal with that first, since an overlapping install is the most common cause of a setup that stops halfway.

1. Enable hardware virtualisation in the machine firmware before starting.
2. Disable any conflicting hypervisor feature on the host, since two cannot own the processor at once.
3. Extract the archive and run setup as administrator.
4. Reboot when setup asks, since the network and virtual device drivers need it.
5. Store virtual machine files on a fast internal drive with plenty of free space.

System requirements and file details

Frequently asked about this title