Many users have been taking advantage of Microsoft Hyper-V features that on the surface don’t exactly look like the typical virtualization we’re used to. Device Guard and Credential guard, for example, provide an extra layer of security by using the virtualization extensions of x86 CPU’s and Microsoft’s Hyper-V hypervisor.
Hyper-V is also involved in running Windows Subsystem For Linux (v2) and Windows Server Containers behind the scenes.
And while this is a very effective suite of security barriers and great new set of ‘no compromise’ Linux and open source tools for developers, unfortunately it renders Workstation unable to launch.
Monday morning at VMworld 2019 we presented our annual ‘What’s New‘ session to talk about the upcoming Fusion and Workstation releases and share a little of our roadmap. More on that here.
Closing out the presentation we had “One More Thing” to share, and we brought our friend Ben Armstrong, Product Manager for the Microsoft Windows Hypervisor Platform, to join us in announcing something we’ve been working on for quite some time now.
For the past year we’ve been collaborating closely with Microsoft on the Windows Hypervisor Platform engineering team so that Workstation can co-exist with Hyper-V enabled hosts.
Our demo consisted of booting both an Ubuntu Linux virtual machine and a Windows 10 virtual machine on a host with Hyper-V features, specifically device guard and credential guard, enabled. While it was a little slow, we had no errors and were able to even open up a youtube video.
By building into Workstation the ability to use these new Hypervisor API’s at its core layers of operation, Hyper-V features and VMware Workstation virtual machines will be able to co-exist at the same time on the same host, out of the box.
We have a ways to go still, but we wanted to share this with our users to let them know that this was something we were working on with the highest of priorities, even tho we couldn’t talk about it until now.
We’re excited about the future and our ongoing collaboration with Microsoft and the WHP team, and look forward to sharing a tech demo in 2020.
When the VMworld Recordings go live you we will update this post and link to our session.
See Ben Armstrong’s blog post on the topic here:
https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Virtualization/VMware-Workstation-and-Hyper-V-Working-Together/ba-p/825831
