Extending the life of the existing product version, we’ve done a barrage of new testing with Windows 11 as both Host and Guest, and made some minor changes to accommodate the new OS. From a supportability perspective, we’re extending our “General Support” period until December 2022, meaning we will continue to provide new features, bug and security fixes to Workstation 16 until then.
Getting ready for Windows 11, the Windows 10 Guest OS type in Workstation 16.2 has been renamed ‘Windows 10 and Later’. This has a profile that supports Windows 10 by default, but can be adjusted to more fully support Windows 11. (i.e. Secure Boot, vTPM, CPU/RAM minimum requirements, etc).
We’re also shipping a currently-experimental vTPM device that boasts a reduced performance impact by employing a new encryption model, as well as several new options for managing Workstation installations at scale.
To use this experimental device, just add the following to your Windows 11 (or whatever) .vmx config file and restart Fusion:
managedVM.autoAddVTPM="software"
This replaces the need to do full-VM encryption, which we expect users to notice a happy performance increase for use cases that require a VTPM
As a Host operating system, running VMware virtual machines on Windows 11 with Workstation works just as it did on top of the more recent versions of Windows 10.
One change to note is that in this round we are finally deprecating the “Shared VM” feature code after over a year since we first announced it. Artifacts in the UI should no longer be present, Workstation can no longer be shared over the network like an ESXi host, and VMs configured to auto-start will not do so after installing this update.
A big new feature this year is the updates to our Vulcan rendering engine on Workstation for Linux, which now supports Intel, AMD and Nvidia GPUs. OpenGL 4.1 and DirectX 11 graphics for Guests on Workstation for Linux hosts.
Read more in the Release Notes:
– Workstation Pro Release Notes
– Workstation Player Release Notes
