March 8th, 2013· On a Windows 7 host, when you plug and unplug a headset several times, the audio card of the guest would not work. This has been fixed in Workstation 9.0.2.
· When installing VMware Tools in Linux virtual machines, the The default screen resolution options have been standardized to 640x480, 800x600, 1024x768, or 1280x800 for the initial login. After login, resolution can be set to any value the user desires or Autofit can be used.
· Image copy/paste now correctly function with Solaris 10 and 11 guests.
· The list of available NICs in the Automatic Bridging Settings dialog window is now refreshed without restarting Player.
· A memory leak that impacted Windows hosts and guests has been fixed.
· When running in a Linux distribution using the GNOME 3 desktop environment, Desktop folders now open as expected.
VMware Tools no longer crashes on Windows 2008 Server Core x64 SP2 operating system, with the following error:
· VMware Tools unrecoverable error: (vthread-3)
· Exception 0xc0000005 (access violation) has occurred.
· However, Windows 2008 Server Core x64 SP2 is not a supported operating system for VMware Workstation.
· Scrolling with a Lenovo ThinkPad UltraNav scroll button no longer requires excessive force.
November 8th, 2012This release of VMware Player adds the following new features and support:
· Support for Ubuntu 12.10 as a host and guest has been added to Player 5.0.1
· Solaris 11 has been added to guest OS list.
The following issues are resolved in VMware Player 5.0.1:
· When powering on a virtual machine with Binary Translation on a SMEP-capable CPU, Player no longer causes the host to reset. If you run Windows 8 hosts on IvyBridge processors, VMware strongly recommends that you update your installation of Player.
· Several security vulnerabilities have been addressed, including updating third party libraries.
· For host systems with more than 4GB of memory, Player will use more of the available memory to run virtual machines.
· The ability to mount a .vmdk file as a drive by right-clicking the file in File Explorer has been restored.
· Occasionally, certain elements in the Windows 8 user interface were incorrectly displayed. This has been fixed.
· After disconnecting certain USB devices from a virtual machine, Player would prevent devices from being reconnected without restarting the virtual machine. A more comprehensive error handling code has been added to prevent this problem from occurring.
· To improve application startup performance, the data being collected as part of the optional User Experience Improvement Program will no longer be aggregated on every launch of Player.
· Easy Install on the Linux version of Player now recognize all compatible operating systems.
· The VMware monitor has been updated to work with Linux kernel 3.5.
· Animated cursors are now displayed correctly in a virtual machine.
June 14th, 2012General Issues:
· Linux guests running the Linux kernel version 2.6.34 or later could not be pinged from the host via an IPv6 address.
· On rare occasions, Linux guests would suddenly fail to Autofit or enter Unity.
· Unity mode would exit if the title bar of an application contained certain non UTF-8 encoded extended ASCII characters.
· On Windows hosts, the VMware Workstation user interface sometimes became unresponsive when minimized from full-screen mode if the suggestion balloon was being displayed.
· On Windows hosts, the user interface sometimes became unresponsive if the application was rendered on an extended display that was abruptly disconnected.
Security Issues:
· VMware host Checkpoint file memory corruption
· Input data was not properly validated when loading Checkpoint files. This issue could have allowed an attacker with the ability to load a specially crafted Checkpoint file to execute arbitrary code on the host.
· The Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures project (cve.mitre.org) has assigned the name CVE-2012-3288 to this issue.
· VMware virtual machine remote device denial of service
· A device (such as CD-ROM or keyboard) that is available to a virtual machine while physically connected to a system that does not run the virtual machine is referred to as a remote device. Traffic coming from remote virtual devices was incorrectly handled. This issue could have allowed an attacker who was capable of manipulating the traffic from a remote virtual device to crash the virtual machine.
· The Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures project (cve.mitre.org) has assigned the name CVE-2012-3289 to this issue.
May 10th, 2012Resolved Issues:
· VMware floppy device out-of-bounds memory write
· Due to a flaw in the virtual floppy configuration it was possible to perform an out-of-bounds memory write. This vulnerability allowed a guest user to crash the VMX process or to potentially execute code on the host.
· The Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures project (cve.mitre.org) has assigned the name CVE-2012-2449 to this issue.
· VMware SCSI device unchecked memory write
· Due to a flaw in the SCSI device registration it was possible to perform an unchecked write into memory. This vulnerability allowed a guest user to crash the VMX process or to potentially execute code on the host.
· The Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures project (cve.mitre.org) has assigned the name CVE-2012-2450 to this issue.
January 26th, 2012What's New:
· Ubuntu 11.10 is supported as a host.
· Fedora 16 is supported as a guest.
· Many customer-reported issues have been resolved.
Resolved Issues:
· The ACLs on the PID files needed improvement. VMware thanks Inode0 for bringing this to our attention.
· Releasing input from the guest to the host, for example, moving the cursor from the virtual machine window to the host screen, failed with an unrecoverable error.
· Copying and pasting from a guest to an Ubuntu 11.10 host failed.
· Shared folders did not work in Fedora 16 and OpenSuse 12.1 guests.
· In Ubuntu 11.10 hosts, key repeat was disabled after ungrabbing or quitting VMware Player.
· On a Windows host, a virtual machine configured to use a physical disk or partition failed to power on if the host had a volume backed by more than one physical disk, for example, a RAID system.
November 21st, 2011Highlights of VMware Player 4.0.1 functionality include:
· Graphics performance and compatibility enhancements.
· Ubuntu 11.10 is officially supported as a guest operating system.
· Disk and memory management issues have been addressed.
· Many customer-reported issues have been resolved.
The following issues are resolved in VMware Player 4.0.1:
· Windows 7 guest installation failed after powering on the virtual machine with the error A required CD/DVD drive device driver is missing. If you have a driver floppy disk, CD, DVD, or USB flash drive, please insert it now.
· VMware Tools failed with the message VMware Tools unrecoverable error.
· VMware Tools failed to start in Fedora 15 guests.
· An Ubuntu 11.10 guest crashed with a signal 11 error if you installed or upgraded VMware Tools.
· On hosts with Nvidia GeForce and Quadro video cards, some of the clouds in the Unigine Heaven Benchmark application were drawn solid black.
· Easy Install did not properly function on Ubuntu 11.10.
· CD/DVD mount Linux.iso failed while installing VMware Tools in Ubuntu 11.10 guests.
· The AltGr key was not working in an Ubuntu guest in Unity mode when the host and guest keyboards were both set to a layout that contained the AltGr key.
October 6th, 2011· The display technology has been changed to provide a better experience for Unity users and users who have multiple monitors. These changes also allow you to add a projector to your laptop without restarting your virtual machine.
· Virtual machines can now support up to 64GB of memory. The host system should have more than 64GB of memory to use this feature.
· An HD Audio device is available for Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 2008, and Windows 2008 R2 guests. The HD Audio device is compatible with the RealTek ALC888 7.1 Channel High Definition Audio Codec.
· USB 3.0 support is available for Linux guests running kernel version 2.6.35 or later (Ubuntu 10.10) through a new virtual xHCI USB controller. To enable this feature, add the following line to the .vmx file: usb_xhci.present = “true”. Do not enable this feature for Windows guests. Because Windows does not currently have a generic xHCI driver, this feature will not work in Windows.
· Bluetooth devices on the host can now be shared with Windows guests. With the latest hardware version, Bluetooth devices that are paired to the host system radio are available to Windows guests and can be paired from within the guest. You should not pair Bluetooth audio devices, such as headphones, or Bluetooth input devices, such as keyboards and mice, to a guest.
March 30th, 2011· In Player 3.1, the default main memory VA cache size (mainMem.vaCacheSize) for 32-bit Windows guests was reduced to accommodate 3D emulation memory requirements. However, the reduced value resulted in performance loss. For 3.1.4, the default main memory VA cache size has been be increased to 1000 MB and performance is improved.
· Because Player failed to identify more than 10 USB host controllers in newer Windows guests, some USB devices did not appear in the Removable Devices menu. Now Player shows all USB devices in the Removable Devices menu as long as they are connected to the first identified 16 USB controllers.
· The application vmware-modconfig UI could not start up in a KDE 4 session in a SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop (SLED) 11 environment.
· VMware Tools upgrade could be started by a non-administrator user from the VMware Tools Control Panel in a Windows guest. In this release, only administrator users can start VMware Tools upgrade from the VMware Tools Control Panel. To prevent non-administrator users from starting VMware Tools upgrade from a guest by using other applications, set isolation.tools.autoinstall.disable to TRUE in the virtual machine configuration (.vmx) file.
· When a virtual machine running on a Windows host was used to access an Omron Industrial CP1L Programmable Logic Controller, Player generated an unrecoverable error.
· When using NAT virtual networking on Windows hosts, the traceroute command did not work when used within virtual machines.
· The Easy Install feature did not work for Fedora 14 guest operating systems.
· During VMware Tools installation on a Fedora 14 64-bit guest operating system, the following warning message was generated while building the vsock module: case value '255' not in enumerated type 'socket_state'.
· The Easy Install feature did not work for Red Hat Linux 6 guest operating systems.
· The VMware Tools HGFS provider DLL caused a deadlock when making calls to the WNetAddConnection2 function from an application such as eEye Rentina in a Windows guest operating system.
· There was no option to disable guest time sync when a host resumes. Now you can set time.synchronize.resume.host to FALSE in the virtual machine configuration (.vmx) file to disable guest time sync when a host resumes. See VMware Knowledge Base Article 1189 for other time sync options.
· Setting a hidden attribute on a file in a shared folder from a Windows guest on a Linux host failed with an error. This problem caused applications such as SVN checkout to fail when checking out to shared folders on Linux hosts from Windows guests.
November 22nd, 2010· When you install VMware Player on an operating system that uses a post-2.6.34 Linux kernel, the vmmon module fails to compile.
· The vmxnet and vsock guest modules fail to compile on operating systems that use post-2.6.32 Linux kernels.
· When you install VMware Tools on an operating system that uses a post-2.6.34 Linux kernel, the vsock.ko module fails to build.
· Unity mode does not work with an Ubuntu 10.10 64-bit guest operating system.
· An unrecoverable error occurs when you select the Novell NetWare, Sun Solaris, or Other guest operating system type in the New Virtual Machine wizard.
September 27th, 2010Security Fixes:
· VMware Player 3.x addresses an installer security issue
· The VMware Player 3.x installer loads an index.htm file located in the current working directory on which VMware Player 3.x is being installed. This might enable attackers to display a malicious file if they manage to get their file onto the system prior to installation.
· The Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures project (cve.mitre.org) has assigned the name CVE-2010-3277 to this issue.
· Third party libpng updated to version 1.2.44
· A buffer overflow condition in libpng is addressed that could potentially lead to code execution with the privileges of the application using libpng. Two potential denial of service issues are also addressed in the update.
· The Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures project (cve.mitre.org) has assigned the names CVE-2010-1205, CVE-2010-0205, and CVE-2010-2249 to these issues.
Installation, Upgrade, and Compatibility:
· In some cases copying an index.html file into the same directory as the VMware Player 3.1.1 installer executable on Windows hosts might cause the VMware Player installer user interface to fail.
· On Linux hosts, if the screen saver becomes active during the VMware Player software update process, the update might fail.
· When downloading software updates via a slow Internet connection, you might receive a timeout error resulting in an unsuccessful download.
Display:
· To improve user experience when using Unity mode on Windows Vista and Windows 7 virtual machines, VMware Player disables Aero when entering Unity mode and re-enables it when you exit Unity mode. To override the disabling of Aero, open the vmx configuration file and add unity.allowCompositingInGuest="TRUE".
· Rebooting an Ubuntu 10.04 host after installing VMware Player, might cause the System Tools option under the Application menu to disappear.
· On Linux hosts, the Cycle to Next/Previous open VM button might not appear consistently in the VMware Player full screen toolbar.
· Attempting to power on a Windows 7 virtual machine named using non-ASCII characters on Ubuntu 10.04 hosts might cause display issues in the Unity Start menu.
· Enabling Aero on hosts with Intel Integrated Graphics processing unit might cause display issues in a virtual machine.
· On Windows hosts, you might experience some usability issues while attempting to interact with Fedora 13 virtual machine applications in Unity mode.
· On Fedora 13 virtual machines, dragging guest applications along the edges of the guest display might cause the mouse functions to become unresponsive.
· On Japanese version of Windows, using non-ASCII characters to name the host might cause the Start menu to not show in Unity mode.
Miscellaneous:
· The DNS server information might not refresh when the virtual machine switches between multiple NICs, such as wired and wireless. Thus leading to a failure in looking up hosts with their DNS names when guest is using NAT.
· If your host system has three parallel ports you might not be able map these ports non-sequentially.
· On Ubuntu guests, the vmware-user component of VMware Tools might become unresponsive after Autologon is enabled on the guest and cause drag and drop or copy and paste operations to fail.
· USB devices with vendor ID 0x1366 might be identified as being manufactured by Asahi KASEI instead of SEGGER.
· Dragon Medical 10.1 from Nuance might not run with more than one core on Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit guests.
· On Windows 7 guests, you must run a New Hardware scan from the Device Manager menu for Logitech USB audio devices to be recognized. USB devices disconnected from the guest might still appear to be connected in the guest, and the guest might not allow you to reconnect them.
· On some Windows guests, the volume control keys and a few other multimedia keys might not work in a virtual machine.
· Error in NetBIOS forwarding in NAT leads to incorrect resolution of WINS name of the virtual machine.
· On Linux hosts, launching a virtual machine application shortcut that includes either non-ASCII characters or a long path might not work on the first attempt.
April 2nd, 2009VMware provides support for the following operating systems for Player 2.5.2:
· Windows Vista Service Pack 1 and Service Pack 2
· Asianux Server 3.0 Service Pack 1
· openSUSE 11.1
· Ubuntu 8.10
· Ubuntu 8.04 LTS
VMware provides experimental support to the following operating systems for Player:
· Asianux Server 3 Service Pack 1
· Fedora 11
· FreeBSD 7.1
· Mandriva Linux 2009
· Microsoft Windows 7
· Novell SLE11.0
· Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3
· Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.8
· Sun Solaris 10 Update 6
· Ubuntu 9.04
November 21st, 2008· Japanese localization — A localized version of VMware Player is now available in Japanese for Windows hosts.
· Smart card support for Linux guests — Smart cards are now experimentally supported with Linux guests.
· Unity mode on Linux guests — Although support for Unity mode on Linux guests is still experimental, repainting of application windows is much improved.
· 3-D graphics — Additional improvements have been made to improve 3-D performance on Windows XP guests.
October 1st, 2008Major New Features :
· Unity view — Integrate your favorite guest applications with your host. Open the application window, enter Unity view, and the VMware Player window is automatically minimized. The guest application windows look just like host application windows, but with color-coded borders. You can access the virtual machine's Start menu (for Windows virtual machines) or Applications menu (for Linux virtual machines) by placing the mouse pointer over the host's Start or Applications menu, or by using a key combination.
· Installer bundle for Linux hosts — Installing VMware Player on Linux hosts just got a lot easier. The new bundle format provides a graphical UI wizard for most Linux operating systems. With a few mouse clicks, VMware Player is installed. For users who want a custom installation, a command-line interface provides complete control.
· Accelerated 3-D graphics on Windows XP guests — VMware Player 2.5 virtual machines now work with applications that use DirectX 9 accelerated graphics with shaders up through Shader Model 2.0 on Windows XP guests. Hosts can be running Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Vista, or Linux.
Usability Enhancements:
· Full screen mode — While in full screen mode, you can now switch from one powered-on virtual machine to another.
· Suspend and exit — Both Windows and Linux hosts now support suspending the virtual machine when exiting.
· Change preferences — Set preferences, such as how devices are displayed in VMware Player.
· Expanded in-product help system — When you choose Help > Help Topics, or click a Help button in a dialog box, you have access to twice as much content as was provided in VMware Player 2.0.
Performance Improvements:
· Folder sharing and dragging, dropping, copying, and pasting text and files — Transferring files between virtual machines or between host and guests using these features is up to 25 percent faster.
· Memory allocation — Change the amount of memory allocated to the virtual machine.
New Platform Capabilities:
· (Experimental) Support for smart cards in virtual machines — You can plug a smart card reader into a host and insert your smart card to authenticate yourself on your host or on a guest. Smart cards can be shared between the host and guests or between guests.
· Text copy and paste enhancements — On Windows guests, you can copy and paste text in rich text format, and copy up to 4MB of text. (On Linux guests, the old limitations still apply. You can copy and paste up to 64K of plain text.)
August 31st, 2008· FreeType was updated to 2.3.7, resolving several security vulnerabilities reported as CVE-2008-1806, CVE-2008-1807, and CVE-2008-1808.
· Cairo was updated to 1.4.14, resolving an integer overflow vulnerability CVE-2007-5503.
· Several ActiveX security issues, reported as CVE-2008-3691, CVE-2008-3692, CVE-2008-3693, CVE-2008-3694, CVE-2008-3695, CVE-2007-5438, and CVE-2008-3696, were resolved.
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