VMware Workstation 15.1 Player Release Notes

VMware Workstation 15.1 Player | 14 May 2019 | Build 13591040

What's in the Release Notes

About VMware Workstation Pl ayer
What's New
Important Fixes
Prior Releases
Resolved Issues
Known Issues

About VMware Workstation Player

VMware Workstation Player™ is a streamlined desktop virtualization application that runs another operating system on the same computer without rebooting. VMware Workstation Player provides a simple user interface, unmatched operating system support, and portability across the VMware ecosystem.

For more information, see the broader VMware Workstation Player documentation.

What's New

VMware Workstation 15.1 Player is a free upgrade for all VMware Workstation 15 Player users. It includes the following updates:

Support for new guest operating systems:
- Windows 10 19H1
- Ubuntu 19.04
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.0
- Fedora 30
- ESXi 6.7 Update 2

VMware Workstation 15.1 Player also contains bug fixes and security updates.

Important Fixes

This release of VMware Workstation Player addresses the following issues:

VMware Workstation 15.1 Player supports Hypervisor-Specific Mitigations and Hypervisor-Assisted Guest Mitigations for Microarchitectural Data Sampling (MDS) vulnerabilities identified by CVE-2018-12126, CVE-2018-12127, CVE-2018-12130 and CVE-2019-11091. For more information, see VMware Security Advisory VMSA-2019-0008.
VMware Workstation 15.1 Player addresses a DLL hijacking issue. The Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures project (cve.mitre.org) has assigned the identifier CVE-2019-5526 to this issue. For more information, see VMSA-2019-0007.

Prior Releases

Features and Known Issues from prior releases of VMware Workstation 15 Player are described in the release notes for each release. To view the release notes for a prior release, click the appropriate link:

Resolved Issues

Items in the Removable Devices menu flicker and cannot be selected.
On a virtual machine running the Android Debug Bridge (adb) server, the items in the VM > Removable Devices menu may flicker (open and close continually and rapidly) without allowing you to select them.

This issue has been resolved in this release.
On Windows 10 19H1 hosts, virtual machines may fail to power on.
When a virtual machine is launched from a host machine running Windows 10 19H1, it may display a blank screen and fail to start.

This issue has been fixed in this release.
Screen flickering may be observed on virtual machines.
At short intervals, the screen of a virtual machine may briefly switch to black and then reset to its normal state.

This issue has been resolved in this release.
On systems with multiple monitors, dialog boxes are stretched across the screens.
When Workstation Player is maximized on a computer with multiple monitors, dialog boxes are displayed incorrectly and cannot be used easily.

This issue has been resolved in this release.

Known Issues

On hosts running Ubuntu 19.04 or Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.0, the Install/Reinstall VMware Tools menu fails to open.
When you attempt to open the Install/Reinstall VMware Tools menu on Ubuntu 19.04 or Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.0, the following error is displayed:
```
Could not find component on update server. Contact VMware Support or your system administrator.
```
Workaround: Manually install the required ncurses libraries on your host machine.
- For Ubuntu 19.04, install the libncursesw5 package.
- For Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.0, install the ncurses-compat-libs-6.1-7.20180224.el8.x86_64.rpm package.
Poor display performance is experienced on virtual machines with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.0 manually installed.
The mesa-libxatracker and xorg-x11-drv-vmware packages are not installed by default on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.0, causing poor display performance on X Window System (X11) desktop environments. In addition, the resolutionSet function does not work even when VMware Tools is installed.

Workaround: Choose either of the following options:
- Use Easy Install to install Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.0 as a guest operating system. This process will install the required packages automatically.
- Manually install the mesa-libxatracker and xorg-x11-drv-vmware packages.
Files and folders cannot be transferred to certain newer Linux distributions using the copy and paste function.
If you copy a file or folder and attempt to paste it to a host or guest machine, the operation will fail when the target machine is running the following Linux distributions:
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.0
- Fedora 30
- Ubuntu 19.04
Workaround: Drag and drop objects to transfer them to hosts or guests running the affected operating systems. Alternatively, you can use the Shared Folders feature.