VMware Workstation team is proud to announce VMware Workstation Tech Preview 20H1 is now available.
What’s New with VMware Workstation Tech Preview 20H1
With the first release of our 2020 Tech Preview branch, version 20H1 users are now able to run virtual machines on Windows 10 when Hyper-V or host Virtualization Based Security is turned on. You can run Device Guard, Credential Guard services at the same time as VMware Workstation.
At VMworld 2019, the team brought Microsoft on stage for a joint demo, showing for the first time that a virtual machine could be successfully powered on a Hyper-V and VBS (Virtualization Based Security enabled Windows 10 host. After years of hard work, this incredibly challenging and very low-level project has now moved from concept to a preview that you can test today.
Software Requirements
- Windows 10 20H1 from Windows insider program. Minimum build number: 19041.
Hardware Requirements
- Intel Haswell or newer CPU
- AMD Bulldozer or newer CPU
What to Test
With this tech preview, VMware Workstation is supposed to work exactly the same way as Workstation works on the non-Hyper-V/VBS enabled host. Please test your most frequent used scenarios and see how it works. Some of the examples we can think of:
- Create a virtual machine with VMware Workstation Pro Tech Preview 20H1
- Set up all the tools within the virtual machine that you use, use those tools within the virtual machine, and check the tools work as expected
- VM operations, for example, Power On/Off virtual machine, Suspend/Resume, Take snapshot/Revert to snapshot, …
- Copy a VM that was created with earlier Workstation GA version and which is being used in daily work, and run the VM under the tech preview build
Limitations
Comparing with what we demoed at VMworld 2019, Performance of virtual machine have been greatly improved. However, since this is a beta build instead of GA build, the performance may still be not as good as you expect it to be. However, please tell us if you find performance of some applications running within the virtual machine behave far below expectation. General performance of VMware Workstation with host VBS is top priority we target to improve with the GA version to be released soon.
There are some other known issues and limitations. You can check details from user guide under “Documents” of Workstation Pro Tech Preview 20H1 community.
We will answer your questions raised in VMware Workstation Tech Preview 20H1 community and looking forward to your feedback!
Thank you!
VMware Workstation Team
