News

VMware Workstation Gets Hyper-V Support

• By Kurt Mackie
• 08/29/2019

VMware is adding support for Microsoft's Hyper-V to its Workstation product, allowing it to tap other Microsoft technologies that depend on the Windows hypervisor.

The news comes from a Monday VMworld session. According to a separate Tuesday announcement by Ben Armstrong, a principal program manager lead on the core virtualization team at Microsoft, various Microsoft security products for Windows 10 -- including "Credential Guard, Windows Defender Application Guard, and Virtualization Based Security" -- as well as Windows Server Containers and Windows Subsystem for Linux 2, all use Hyper-V technology. However, Hyper-V and the VMware Workstation product haven't been playing well together.

"This has made it challenging for our customers who need to use VMware Workstation," Armstrong wrote. "Historically, it has not be possible to run VMware Workstation when Hyper-V was enabled."

Microsoft and VMware are now working together to change this scenario. At some future point, "users of VMware Workstation will be able to take advantage of all the security enhancements and developer features that are available in Windows 10," Armstrong indicated.

The VMworld session represented "the first public demo of VMware Workstation running on top of the Hyper-V hypervisor," Armstrong added, in a Tuesday Twitter post.

There's no indication on when this integration work will get completed, though.

VMware Workstation can host 64-bit Linux or Windows virtual machines on computers running various operating systems. The product might typically get used by IT pros to test operating systems or applications separately from the physical computer, or to create virtual machine images that are compatible with VMware solutions that can be copied and shared.

Developers can use VMware Workstation for testing the security or hardness of applications apart from the physical machine, and they can access integrated VMware solutions as well. It also lets businesses run Windows on a Mac without a reboot, or gain side-by-side access to various operating systems on a Windows, Mac or Linux machine, according to the VMware's product description.

The VMware Workstation product is currently at version 15.1.0, which was released in May, according to Wikipedia's account.