VMware Workstation 11 works in Vista. What about XP/2003 64-bit?

[buckchow]

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.