VMware Workstation 14.1.1 Pro | 9 Jan 2018 | Build 7528167 Check for additions and updates to these release notes.

What's in the Release Notes

The release notes cover the following topics:

• About VMware Workstation Pro
• Prior Releases
• Security

About VMware Workstation Pro

VMware Workstation Pro enables technical professionals to develop, test, demonstrate, and deploy software by running multiple x86-based Windows, Linux, and other operating systems simultaneously on the same PC.

You can replicate server, desktop, and tablet environments in a virtual machine and allocate multiple processor cores, gigabytes of main memory and graphics memory to each virtual machine, whether the virtual machine resides on a personal PC or on a private enterprise cloud.

For more information, see the VMware Workstation Pro documentation.

Prior Releases

Features and Known Issues from prior releases of VMware Workstation Pro are described in the release notes for each release. To view release notes for prior releases of VMware Workstation 14 Pro, click the following link:

• VMware Workstation 14 Pro Version 14.1
• VMware Workstation 14 Pro

Security

This update of VMware Workstation Pro exposes hardware support for branch target injection mitigation to VMware guests.   This hardware is used by some guest operating systems to mitigate CVE-2018-5715 (also called by the name "Spectre").

For a guest operating system to use hardware support for branch target injection mitigation, the following steps must be taken:

1. Install this update of VMware Workstation Pro.
2. Ensure that your VM is using Hardware Version 9 or higher.  For best performance, Hardware Version 11 or higher is recommended.
3. Update your guest operating system with fixes for CVE-2018-5715 (consult the operating system vendor for these updates).
4. Update the host firmware (or CPU microcode, if host firmware cannot be updated).

Please see VMware knowledge base article 52025 for more details.