Tuesday 16 August 2011

VMWare on a machine hosting the Hyper-V role

A quick trick if you want to run VMWare workstation on a machine that's running Hyper-V.
Normally you can't run VMWare when the Hyper-V role is enabled on a machine, as the hypervisor will claim some resources upon startup ... which are also needed by VMWare to run its virtual machines.

But I found the following trick to work like a charm:
  1. Open a command prompt and type the following:
    bcdedit /copy {default} /d "Windows Without Hypervisor"
    The above command should say: The entry was successfully copied to {guid}.
  2. Copy that guid to the clipboard (including the curly braces!).
  3. Finally, execute the following command in the command prompt:
    bcdedit /set {guid} hypervisorlaunchtype off
    Replace {guid} with the GUID that you copied in step 2.

This will create a new entry in your boot menu, called "Windows Without Hypervisor".
  • If you want to run VMWare, just boot your machine using that entry. You won't be able to host HyperV machines, but VMWare will run just fine.
  • If you want to use HyperV, boot your machine using the default boot entry. This will allow you to run Hyper-V machines, but no VMWare.

Yes, the workaround doesn't fix the fact that VMWare vm's can't coexist with HyperV machines ... but for now that's just fine for me. At least now I can run both vm's on my laptop :)

This workaround was also mentioned here, but the original blogpost is no longer available so I just reposted it here. (All credits go to the original poster of course)

1 comment:

  1. thanks, this was very helpful now that hyperv is on Win8 desktop machines.

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