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How to Install VMware Workstation and Build Your First Virtual Machine

2026-09-13 · SoftVault team

Enable virtualisation, install Workstation, create a Windows guest with snapshots and keep performance sane on a single machine.

VMware Workstation turns one PC into several. The install is short, and the two things that trip people up are hardware virtualisation being switched off in the BIOS and Hyper-V quietly reserving the CPU. Sort those out first and everything else is straightforward.

Prerequisites

You need Windows 10 or 11 64-bit, 8 GB of RAM minimum and 16 GB if you plan to run more than one guest, plus about 40 GB of free disk per virtual machine. Enable virtualisation in BIOS or UEFI: look for Intel VT-x or AMD-V in the CPU features. If Hyper-V, WSL2 or memory integrity are enabled, decide which you actually need, because sharing them with VMware works but nested setups get flaky.

Installing Workstation

  1. Unpack the installer and run it as administrator.
  2. Accept the licence and enable the enhanced keyboard driver so common shortcuts reach the guest.
  3. Leave shared VMs and automatic updates off unless you specifically want them.
  4. Finish the install and reboot.
  5. Launch the application and enter the key from your build if it asks.

Creating your first virtual machine

  1. Click Create a New Virtual Machine and choose the Typical configuration.
  2. Point the installer disc image at your ISO, or choose to install the operating system later.
  3. Pick the guest type: Windows 11 guests need the TPM and encryption options enabled.
  4. Give a light Windows guest 4 GB of RAM and 2 cores, or 8 GB and 4 cores for real work.
  5. Create a virtual disk of at least 60 GB as a single file and store it on an SSD, never an external drive.
  6. Finish, then start the machine and let the guest installer run.

The first ten minutes inside the guest

Install VMware Tools from the VM menu, since display scaling, clipboard sharing and drag and drop all depend on it. Then take a snapshot named clean install before you change anything. Snapshots are cheap insurance and the main reason to work in a virtual machine at all.

Performance notes

Enable 3D acceleration only if the guest genuinely needs it, because it costs host resources. Allocate at most half your physical RAM to guests, keep virtual disks on an SSD, and prefer fixed-size disks when performance matters more than disk space. If a guest feels slow, check whether it is paging to a growing disk file.