Thursday, June 21, 2012

VMWare Tools on Windows Server 2012

While attempting to build a Windows Server 2012 virtual machine using VMWare Workstation 8.04, I noticed a particularly problematic issue while installing VMWare Tools on the resultant installation.

As soon as I began installing the ThinPrint drivers which are included with the "Typical Install", I completely blue-screened and bombed out the entire OS!!  I could not even get the server back up after several re-boots of the server.

However, there is a new required VMWare Workstation setting with Windows Server 2012 (thanks to Matthew McDermott for discovering this setting) that allows the VMWare Tools to successfully install!


  1. Open up the Windows Server 2012 VM in VMWare Workstation
  2. Click on Edit Virtual Machine Settings
  3. Select the Display icon
  4. Select the checkbox next to "Accelerate 3D Graphics"
  5. Now go ahead and install VMWare Tools.
  6. You should now notice that the VMWare Tools install properly and provide the same functionality as VMWare Tools on earlier OS releases such as Windows Server 2008 R2!


NOTE: This issue has been resolved with the release of VMWare Workstation 9.

3 comments:

  1. Just enable 3D graphics acceleration for the VM and it will boot.

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  2. Doesn't seem to work when the guest is in Shared mode - highly frustrating

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    Replies
    1. I found that I needed to also manually configure the Display Adapter driver to "Microsoft Basic Display Adapter" and it finally works in Shared Mode as well.

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