VMWare Workstation running on a Windows 8 Host

CoreyRoth — Mon, 19 Mar 2012 14:47:32 GMT

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.

Corey Roth [MVP] : VMWare

VMWare Workstation running on a Windows 8 Host