VMware Workstation Pro (known as VMware Workstation until release of VMware Workstation 12 in 2015) is a hosted (Type 2) hypervisor that runs on x64 versions of Windows and Linux operating systems. It enables users to set up virtual machines (VMs) on a single physical machine and use them simultaneously along with the host machine. Each virtual machine can execute its own operating system, including versions of Microsoft Windows, Linux, BSD, and MS-DOS. VMware Workstation is developed and sold by VMware, which has been owned by Broadcom since November 2023. In May 2024, Workstation Pro became free of charge for personal use, with paid subscriptions available for commercial use, while the free restricted VMware Workstation Player (formerly known as VMware Player), included in Workstation, was dropped as a separate product.VMware's Fusion Pro and Workstation Pro are now free for personal use - ZDnet, 16 May 2024 In November 2024, VMware Workstation was made free for commercial use, with paid subscriptions and support no longer available.
VMware Workstation supports bridging existing host network adapters and sharing physical disk drives and USB devices with a virtual machine. It can simulate disk drives; an ISO image file can be mounted as a virtual optical disc drive, and virtual hard disk drives are implemented as .vmdk files.
VMware Workstation Pro can save the state of a virtual machine (a "snapshot") at any instant. These snapshots can later be restored, effectively returning the virtual machine to the saved state, as it was and free from any post-snapshot damage to the VM.
VMware Workstation includes the ability to group multiple virtual machines in an inventory folder. The machines in such a folder can then be powered on and powered off as a single object, useful for testing complex client-server environments.
History VMware was first released on 15 May 1999.
Company restructuring and product development (2016) VMware Workstation versions 12.0.0, 12.0.1, and 12.1.0 were released at intervals of about two months in 2015. Download site for VMware Player 7.x and Workstation Player 12.x In January 2016, the entire development team behind VMware Workstation and Fusion was disbanded and all US developers were immediately fired. The company said that "the restructuring activities will not impact the existence of any current product lines", that "roles and responsibilities associated with particular businesses will be moved to other regions and office locations", and that investment would continue "with emphasis on our growth products", but the future of Workstation and Fusion became uncertain by that point. On 24 April 2016, maintenance release 12.1.1 was released. Later in September of the same year, the company announced that "we’re very much alive and well". Consequently, on September 13, Workstation 12.5 and Fusion 8.5 were released as free upgrades which added support for Windows 10 Anniversary Update and Windows Server 2016. Since then, active development resumed.
Transition to freeware (2024) In May 2024, VMware Workstation Pro became free for personal use, with only commercial use requiring a paid license, and free VMware Workstation Player was discontinued as unnecessary.
In November 2024, Workstation Pro became free for all users, including commercial and educational users. Technical support for Workstation by Broadcom was discontinued, with help now available only from documentation and the user forum on Broadcom's Web site.
Version history Version Release date Significant changes 15 May 1999 First release 14 June 1999 Added support of Linux kernel 2.3.x 25 June 1999 20 July 1999 New product logo and icons 11 October 1999 First Linux release Added support of Windows 2000 Added support of bidirectional parallel ports Added support of Linux kernel 2.2.10 Improved support for raw disk file configuration via the Configuration Wizard and Editor Improved support for upgrading Linux kernels and for uninstalling the product Experimental support for RPM installations Improved SMP performance in Linux kernel versions 2.2.8 and later Improved built-in help 18 October 1999 Added support of Red Hat Linux 6.1 13 November 1999 Changes in the handling of virtual disks 15 November 1999 3 March 2000 Increased desktop performance Added support of memory and power user changes in Windows 2000 Improved upgrade to new VMware Workstation releases Limited SCSI support for disks and CD-ROM devices Added support for suspending the virtual machine to disk Added support for shrinking the virtual disks Added support of floppy disk images Added support of serial connections Added support of sound input and improved sound output Added support for disconnecting, modifying and editing the removable devices while the virtual machine is running Improved support for raw disks Experimental support of plain disks 19 June 2000 1 August 2000 2 November 2000 Improved mouse performance Added support for wheel mouse Added support for installation of SVGA driver in a Windows Me guest machines 21 May 2001 Added support of Red Hat Linux 7.1 and SUSE Linux 7.1 Increased default memory size of a Linux virtual machine to 64 MB Added support of Pentium 4 processors Added support for Windows 2000 hosts with CD-ROM drives configured for digital audio 11 November 2001 Added support of reading DVD discs Added support of reading enhanced CD discs in the raw access mode 29 March 2002 Increased performance 9 April 2002 Increased performance 16 September 2002 7 April 2003 Single snapshots 15 March 2004 Last version for Windows NT 4.0 on hosts 7 April 2005 Multiple snapshots Linked clones Teams 29 November 2005 Introduced support of Intel VT-x/AMD-V virtualization instructions, as well as x86-64 and multi-processor virtual machines 9 May 2007 Multiple monitor support Background virtual machines High-speed USB devices (EHCI) 23 September 2008 Final version to support CPUs without PAE Record Replay Unicode Unity mode Last version for Windows 2000 on hosts 10 October 2009 Replay Debugging (improved Record Replay) 25 May 2010 14 September 2011 Shared Virtual Machines Workstation 8 is the first version that requires an x64-compatible CPU. Replay Debugging removed 23 August 2012 USB 3.0 support for Linux and Windows 8 guests OpenGL driver for Linux guests Improved graphics subsystem Restricted Virtual Machines Added support of Windows 8, Windows Server 2012 and Ubuntu 12.04 3 September 2013 Added support of Windows 8.1, Windows Server 2012 R2 and Ubuntu 13.10 VMware hardware version 10 16 vCPUs 8 TB disks New virtual SATA disk controller USB 3.0 streams support SSD pass-through Expiring Virtual Machines Virtual tablet sensors Accelerometer Gyroscope Compass Ambient light sensor User interface enhancements Cloud Management Tools VMware KVM WSX 1.1 24 October 2013 Improved compatibility with some AMD Piledriver CPUs Easy Install support for Windows 8.1 RTM and Windows Server 2012 R2 RTM Fixes for certain hangs and freezes 17 April 2014 The compatibility and performance of USB audio and video devices with virtual machines has been improved. Resolved an issue that prevents a USB device from being connected to Linux RHEL 5 guest operating system. Easy installation option supports Windows 8.1 Update 1 and Windows Server 2012 R2 as a guest operating system. openSUSE 13.1 is now supported as a host operating system. Resolved an issue causing burning CDs with Blu-ray drives to fail while connected to the virtual machine. Resolved an issue that caused using Microsoft Word and Excel in unity mode causes a beep. Resolved an issue causing host application windows to be blanked out in the UAC dialog on the Linux host of the Windows 8 virtual machine. Resolved an issue that prevented the Sound Card from being automatically added to the VM when powering on the virtual machine on a Linux host. Resolved an issue that could cause a Windows 8.1 guest operating system to display a black screen when launching Metro style applications in the launch menu. Resolved a hotkey conflict in the Preference dialog of the KVM mode. Resolved a compatibility issue of GL renderer with some new Nvidia drivers. Resolved graphics errors with for Solidworks applications. Resolved an issue causing virtual machines imported from a physical PC to crash on startup. Resolved an issue about shared folder when the user read and write file using two threads. Resolved an issue that caused Linux virtual machines to see stale file contents when using shared folders. Resolved the virtual machine performance issues when using the E1000e adapter. Resolved an issue preventing Workstation from starting on Ubuntu 14.04. 1 July 2014 VMware Workstation 10.0.3 has been updated to the OPENSSL library version openssl-0.9.8za where necessary to address . 30 October 2014 Fixes memory issue in Workstation on Microsoft Windows 8.1 and Windows Server 2012. 27 January 2015 Bug fixes At power-on, a virtual machine hangs and a .dmp file is created. The VideoReDo application does not display the video properly and parts of the application's screen are scrambled. Copying and pasting a large file from host to guest may fail. Memory leak in the HGFS server (for shared folders) causes VMware Tools to crash randomly with the error: Exception 0xc0000005 (access violation) has occurred. New VMs have the same location UUID and MAC address so that the UUID and MAC address are not unique. This problem occurs with WS 9 and WS 10 VMs but not WS 7 and WS 8 VMs. On RHEL 6.6, vmmon cannot be loaded due to incompatible kernel symbol versions. With gcc, kernel-headers, kernel-devel installed, vmmon module will be recompiled automatically. Memory leak by the process vmtoolsd.exe when the guest NIC is disabled causes memory consumption by Workstation processes to increase over time. When USB devices are autoconnected with a hub to a Renesas host controller, the devices are not redirected to the guest. WS 11 license is accepted by WS 10.0.5 and future 10.0 updates. When WS is installed on Linux in a non-default location, the Virtual Network Editor fails to run. 5 May 2015 Fixed a problem when uploading a virtual machine with Workstation 10.0.x to ESXi 6.0. 2 July 2015 Security fixes Last version for Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 on hosts Final version to support 32-bit Windows editions on hosts 1 December 2014 Added support of Windows 10, Ubuntu 14.10, RHEL 7, CentOS 7, Fedora 20 and Debian 7.6 VMware hardware version 11 2 GB Video memory per VM Connection to VMware vCloud Air 17 February 2015 Added support for VMware vCloud Air Virtual Private Cloud OnDemand Bug fixes: A Linux guest OS booted on EFI firmware sometimes failed to respond to the keyboard and mouse if any mouse motion occurred during a short window of time during OS boot. Outlook 2010 would occasionally crash when running in Unity mode. You could not compact or defragment a persistent disk. The UI sometimes crashed when a user copied and pasted a file between two Windows guests. Rendering corruption in UI elements in Fedora 20 guests with 3D enabled. When creating a new virtual machine with SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE) 12, the Easy Install path was not available. 9 June 2015 Critical security fix for VMware Workstation and Horizon Client TPView.ddl and TPInt.dll incorrectly handle memory allocation. On Workstation, this may allow a guest to execute code or perform a Denial of Service on the Windows OS that runs Workstation. 15 June 2015 Security Issues VMware Workstation 11.1.2 has been updated to OpenSSL library version openssl-1.0.1m. Bug Fixes Two interface items on the Access Control screen used the same hot-key combination. Attempting to suspend a Windows virtual machine with the Sensor Diagnostic Tool running caused the virtual machine to become unresponsive.