Virtualization New Added 26 October 2026

VMware Workstation and Device/Credential Guard are not compatible

Older VMware Workstation and Player builds need VT-x to themselves, and Credential Guard, Memory Integrity (HVCI) and Windows Sandbox all start the Hyper-V hypervisor underneath Windows, which claims it first. Workstation 15.5.5 and later can run on top of the Windows Hypervisor Platform instead, so upgrading is usually the cleanest fix. Credential Guard is now on by default on many Windows 11 Enterprise and Education machines, which is why a VM that worked last week stops after a feature update.

Quick fix

Read the commands before running them. Anything that restarts a service, deletes data or changes permissions should be tried on a non-production system first.

Quick fix

# Is Credential Guard or HVCI running? (SecurityServicesRunning: 1 = CG, 2 = HVCI)
Get-CimInstance -ClassName Win32_DeviceGuard -Namespace root\Microsoft\Windows\DeviceGuard | Select-Object VirtualizationBasedSecurityStatus, SecurityServicesRunning

# Is the hypervisor set to launch at boot?
bcdedit /enum | Select-String hypervisorlaunchtype

# Preferred: a current Workstation release, which runs alongside Hyper-V
# using the Windows Hypervisor Platform feature
Enable-WindowsOptionalFeature -Online -FeatureName HypervisorPlatform

# Only if you must keep an old build: turn off Memory Integrity in
# Windows Security > Device security > Core isolation, then
bcdedit /set hypervisorlaunchtype off

# On a managed work machine Credential Guard is set by policy:
# ask your administrator before trying to switch it off

How to diagnose Virtualization errors

Virtualisation errors are usually about hardware virtualisation access: either it is disabled in firmware, or another hypervisor already holds it. On Windows, Hyper-V, WSL 2, Docker Desktop, Credential Guard and memory integrity all claim the virtualisation extensions, and VirtualBox or VMware then fails with a message that mentions VT-x but not the actual conflict.

If the quick fix above does not resolve it, work through these steps. They apply to this whole class of error, not just to this one message, which is usually what saves the time.

Confirm virtualisation is enabled at the CPU level: grep -E 'vmx|svm' /proc/cpuinfo on Linux, or the Performance tab of Task Manager on Windows.
On Windows, check what else is using the hypervisor: bcdedit /enum | findstr hypervisorlaunchtype and whether Hyper-V, WSL 2 or Core Isolation are enabled.
On Linux, check /dev/kvm exists and that your user is in the kvm group; nested virtualisation must be enabled explicitly on cloud VMs.
Match guest additions and tools versions to the hypervisor version: mismatches cause shared folders, clipboard and display problems that look like guest OS bugs.
For WSL, run wsl --status and wsl --update; most WSL 2 errors are a stale kernel or a disabled Virtual Machine Platform feature.

Tools worth reaching for

grep -E 'vmx|svm' /proc/cpuinfo
wsl --status
bcdedit /enum
ls -l /dev/kvm
systemctl status libvirtd

Authoritative references

Primary documentation for this error, worth reading before applying any fix in production.

learn.microsoft.com learn.microsoft.com

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