Corey Roth [MVP]

When I am booted into Windows 8, I often find myself wanting to run some of my existing virtual machines that I created in Oracle Virtualbox of VMWare Workstation.  These products do run under Windows 8 but there are a few things you need to know.  First, you need to know that VMWare Workstation does not get along with the Hyper-V role.  I am excited to try out Hyper-V and see if it can become my full-time virtualization platform.  However, if you do install that role, when you launch a virtual machine in VMWare, you will be told that it is not compatible with Hyper-V and it will simply not run.

Since it will take me some time to get my virtual machines running on Hyper-V, I am not ready to make that jump yet.  I removed the Hyper-V role and then fired up VMWare Workstation again.  When I launched the virtual machine, I got an error about vmci.sys.  This actually used to work prior to installing the Hyper-V role.  I first tried a repair on the VMWare Workstation installation.  Unfortunately, that did not work.  Next, I uninstalled VMWare, while preserving my license and virtual machine configuration.  Once, I reinstalled, I could launch my virtual machines again.