There's a thread in the Vista forum about getting certain versions of VMware Workstation and Player to work beyond the official supported versions.

https://msfn.org/board/topic/180052-tutorial-how-to-install-vmware-workstation-11-or-12-in-vista/

Workstation 10 and Player 6 are the last versions officially supported on XP, 2003, and Vista. Early versions of Workstation 11 (and Player 7) won't install on XP/2003/Vista but when inspected the maximum requirement of any of the .sys drivers is NT 6.1 which corresponds to Vista SP1.

In previous VMware versions there were additional, separate driver files for XP-based Windows versions (32-bit and 64-bit). Notably the vmx86_64 driver was shared by 64-bit XP/2003 and later versions of Windows, so there weren't separate versions. In VMware 11 it looks like no additional dependencies have been added to the vmx86_64 driver. Its minimum OS requirement has been bumped up from 5.2 to 6.0, but with the lack of new dependencies I'm guessing it would still work in XP if that limitation in the header were removed.

Depending on how much the other drivers have changed, there's a small possibility that where the VMware 11 drivers are truly incompatible with XP/2003 64-bit the VMware 10.x 64-bit drivers may be able to replace them. I checked a couple of other drivers (but not all of them) and again noticed no change in dependencies for the Vista-compatible 10.x drivers vs. the Vista-compatible 11.x drivers. This is a good sign, but doesn't necessarily reflect whether the 11.x drivers are providing any new, critical functionality that wouldn't be present if the Vista-compatible 11.x drivers that the 11.x installers include are replaced by XP-compatible 10.x drivers. For example, if critical new functionality related to networking is absent inside the 10.x drivers the Workstation/Player software could potentially run but only if networking is always disabled.

As far as the many DLL files that VMware 11 is bundled with, they all still seem to be built targeting NT 5.2 at most, but I'm not certain that I checked 100% of them.

I plan to look into this a lot more in the future, but I don't have time now and this will likely get put off for months or longer. If anyone else wants to mess around with this I figured I'd share what I observed so far.

It works!

On 7/10/2026 at 4:25 PM, Tech Stuff said:

It works!

I tried replace VMware folder and drivers from system32\drivers but errors:

• VMware 12.0.0
  
• VMware 11.1.4
  

Edited July 14Jul 14 by reboot12

His screencap of it working is in 64bit XP.

Your screencap of it failing is in 32bit XP (I think).

30 minutes ago, NotHereToPlayGames said:

His screencap of it working is in 64bit XP.

Your screencap of it failing is in 32bit XP (I think).

Oh, maybe my screenshots are from C64 or MS-DOS

Guy probably use one-core-api-base with patched kernel32.dll

I'm not using OCAPI, I patched a few binaries from VMware to fix the missing APIs.

You can get my patched installer here. Do note it needs the Microsoft Internationalized Domain Names Mitigation APIs update, which you can get here.

13 hours ago, Tech Stuff said:

I'm not using OCAPI, I patched a few binaries from VMware to fix the missing APIs.

You can get my patched installer here. Do note it needs the Microsoft Internationalized Domain Names Mitigation APIs update, which you can get here.

At the end of the installation I get an error:

Setup failed to generate the SSL keys necessary to run VMware Server. Click OK to cancel this installation.

@Tech Stuff

OK, after installing vcredist x86/x64 (Microsoft Visual C++ 2008 Redistributable -  9.0.30729.6161) VMware Workstation 11.1.4 works on WinXP 64-bit

Is it possible to activate the network somehow?

I can install VMware Bridge Protocol but I cannot add a Bridged connection:

Cannot change network to bridged: There are no un-bridged host network adapters

Other VMware connections do not appear in the network connections window in the WinXP control panel

Edited July 14Jul 14 by reboot12

On 2/21/2020 at 10:53 PM, buckchow said:

...won't install on XP/2003/Vista but when inspected the maximum requirement of any of the .sys drivers is NT 6.1 which corresponds to Vista SP1.

Vista, even Vista SP2 is version NT 6.0 (6002), I don't know where you got 6.1, that's Win "7".

17 hours ago, Tech Stuff said:

I'm not using OCAPI, I patched a few binaries from VMware to fix the missing APIs.

You can get my patched installer here. Do note it needs the Microsoft Internationalized Domain Names Mitigation APIs update, which you can get here.

Now do that in real XP; WinXP has always been x86 and not that patchwork of so called XP 64-bit. That's server (NT 5.2). With no real software support, so useless.

Edited July 14Jul 14 by modnar

56 minutes ago, modnar said:

Now do that in real XP; WinXP has always been x86 and not that patchwork of so called XP 64-bit. That's server (NT 5.2). With no real software support, so useless.

You are writing nonsense opinions you have heard

WinXP 64-bit is a stable system - I know what I'm writing because I have been using it for a long time and it works great

Besides, before you write something, check if it works.

I checked it and it works OK on WinXP 64-bit

@Tech Stuff actually did a good job - his patched version works. Thanks for you

@Tech Stuff

I managed to start a Bridged network connection 

You need to replace four 64-bit drivers from version VMware 10.0.7 in WINDOWS\system32\drivers

• vmnet.sys
• vmnetadapter.sys
• vmnetbridge.sys
• vmnetuserif.sys

Thank you again for the patched version of VMware Workstation 11.1.4

Edited July 14Jul 14 by reboot12