My company had recently changed my laptop to a newer ones. The laptop is running a new Intel Core i7 CPU with Windows 11 installed. As usual, I installed VMware Workstation 16 Pro on it and ported my old VMs to the new laptop. I’m surprised that I’m not being able to power on my VMs.
I’m “greeted” with a pop up message on when I attempt to run my VMs.
After doing my own research and googling, it seems like this issue will occurred when you are running Windows 10 20H1 build 19041.264 or newer. A lot of people in the community mentioned that you can resolve the issue by simply by running “bcdedit /set hypervisorlaunchtype off” from the command prompt or powershell. But that alone doesn’t resolve my issue.
Then I finally found a VMware KB article that really works for me. But before we begin, you may want to ensure that you have already enabled “Intel virtualization or Intel-VT from your machine’s bios. Also remember to have your VMware Workstation upgraded to at least 15.5.6.
Step 1: Ensure that your Windows HyperV had been disabled
From Control panel, go to “Programs and Features”
Click on “Turn Windows Features on or off”
In my case I untick “Hyper-V Hypervisor”, “Hyper-V Services”, “Virtual Machine Platform” and “Windows Hypervisor Platform”.
Step 2: Launch the Command Prompt or Powershell in administrator mode and type “bcdedit /enum {current}“. Note down the setting “hypervisorlaunchtype“. (Somehow mine is not present as shown in the screenshot)
On the command prompt, type “bcdedit /set hypervisorlaunchtype off“. This will disable the Hyper-V hypervisor.
Reboot your machine after that and see if your old VMs can be powered on. If it doesn’t work, please continue to follow the steps shown below.
Step 3: Run Group policy editor. Please take note that this will only work if you are running Windows 10 Pro & above.
Navigate Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > System > Device Guard and double click on “Turn On Virtualization Based Security”. Select “Disabled” and click Ok.
Additionally, I also ran this step below which is actually meant for Windows Home. You can choose not to do it and see if sufficient enough to fix your issue.
Step 4: Launch Registry Editor
Navigate Local Machine > System > Current Control Set > Control > Device Guard. On the right panel, right click and select New > DWORD 32bit
Type “EnableVirtualizationBasedSecurity” and set the value to 0.
Navigate to Local Machine > System > Current Control Set > Control > Lsa. Create a DWORD 32bit, type “LsaCfgFlags” and set value to 0.
Finally, now you can reboot your machine and power on your VM!!.
For more details on this you can refer to VMware KB 2146361
Extras:
If you are running VMware Workstation 16 or latest VMware Fusion, you may want to disable ” Side Channel Mitigations”. Disabling this may improve performance of your VM but be aware of Spectre meltdown issue on Intel CPU.
- Ensure your VM is shutdown
- Navigate to VM > Options > Advanced
- Tick the “Disable Side Channel Mitigations for Hyper-V enabled hosts”
For more detail please read VMware KB 79832
Also if you are running nested VMs (VM in VM), then ensure that “Virtualize Intel VT-x/EPT” is not ticked.
Hope you enjoy the post 🙂