VMware Workstation 15.1 Pro | 14 May 2019 | Build 13591040

What's in the Release Notes

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.

What's New

VMware Workstation 15.1 Pro is a free upgrade for all VMware Workstation 15 Pro 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
  • Stretch guest display: This feature is now extended to support all guests running on Windows hosts.
    In Workstation 15.0.x, stretch guest for Windows was supported only for versions earlier than Windows 7. This limitation has been removed in Workstation 15.1.

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

Important Fixes

This release of VMware Workstation Pro addresses the following issues:

  • VMware Workstation 15.1 Pro 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 Pro 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 Pro are described in the release notes for each release. To view the release notes for a prior release, click the appropriate link:

Resolved Issues

  • Accessing a Novell network drive through Shared Folder on a virtual machine can cause the host operating system to stop unexpectedly.

    If you access a Novell network drive through the Shared Folder feature on a virtual machine, the host system will stop responding and display an error message on a blue screen.

    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.

  • A virtual machine cannot be cloned to a virtual drive mapped from a directory in Windows.

    If you use the subst command on a Windows system to map a path to a drive letter, cloning a virtual machine to that drive letter will fail with the error "One of the parameters supplied is invalid".

    This issue has been resolved 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 Pro 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

  • DPI scaling settings cannot be synchronized to virtual machines running Windows 10 19H1.

    The display scaling settings of the host machine cannot be synchronized to Windows 10 19H1 virtual machines even when the Automatically adjust user interface size in the virtual machine option is enabled. This issue does not affect earlier versions of Windows 10.

    Workaround: Grant the current user the read permissions required to enable DPI synchronization.

    1. On the affected virtual machine, open Registry Editor.
    2. Select the Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\GraphicsDrivers key.
    3. Right-click the Configuration key and select Permissions.
    4. Click the Add... button and add the current user.
    5. In the Group or user names pane, select the current user and click the checkbox in the Allow column next to Read.
    6. Apply the configuration and restart the virtual machine.
  • On hosts running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.0, upload/download and import/export operations on virtual machines fail.

    An unknown error is reported when you attempt to perform the following operations on a Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.0 host:

    • Upload a virtual machine to vSphere.
    • Download a virtual machine from vSphere.
    • Import an OVA or OVF file into Workstation Pro.
    • Export a virtual machine to an OVA or OVF file.

    Workaround: Manually install the libnsl package on the host machine.

  • 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.

  • Virtual machines running Windows 10 19H1 fail to start if IOMMU virtualization is enabled.

    If input-output memory management unit (IOMMU) virtualization is enabled on a Windows 10 19H1 virtual machine, the virtual machine will fail to boot. This issue does not occur in Windows 10 1809 or older versions.

    Workaround: To use IOMMU virtualization on Windows 10 19H1 virtual machines, follow the procedure described in KB 68043. If you do not require IOMMU support, you can disable it as follows:

    1. Power off the virtual machine.
    2. In Workstation, select VM > Settings, click the Hardware tab, and select Processors.
    3. Deselect the Virtualize IOMMU checkbox.
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