In this tutorial you will learn how to install VMware Workstation on Linux systems. Before we start with the tutorial, this is the trial version of the VMware Workstation, which means after 30 days you’ll be asked to register your software by purchasing a license. VMware Workstation it’s not a free software, however 30 days i think it’s more than enough to give you an idea how the software works.
What is VMware Workstation?
VMware Workstation is a hosted hypervisor that runs on x64 versions of Windows and Linux operating systems[4] (an x86version of earlier releases was available);[3] it enables users to set up virtual machines (VMs) on a single physical machine, and use them simultaneously along with the actual machine. Each virtual machine can execute its own operating system, including versions of Microsoft Windows, Linux, BSD, and MS-DOS. VMware Workstation is developed and sold by VMware, Inc., a division of Dell Technologies.
vmware-workstation is available on the aur repository so you can download it via any aur package manager you want. In this tutorial i used yay
yay -S vmware-workstation
Once you run this command you’ll be asked to choose the version of the vmware-workstation you want to install, select which version and press enter so you can proceed with the installation.
Download first vmware workstation pro via the link below, you don’t have to fill out forms or something, simply click the link below and the downloading will start automatically.
https://www.vmware.com/go/getworkstation-linux
The file that we are downloading is called “VMware-Workstation-Full-15.0.2-10952284.x86_64.bundle”, after downloading we’ll need to make the file executable.
Once the file has been downloaded to your computer, browse to the directory where the file was downloaded in this case “Downloads Folder” and run the terminal from there. All you have to do is run the command below.
sudo chmod +x VMware-Workstation-Full-15.0.2-10952284.x86_64.bundle
Additionally you can do it directly from the terminal without having to browse manually to the downloads folder.
sudo chmod a+x ~/Downloads/VMware-Workstation-Full-15.0.2-10952284.x86_64.bundle
Now we have to install dependencies, to do that run the following command below.
sudo apt-get -y install gcc make linux-headers-$(uname -r) dkms
This is the last step, we made the file executable in the step 2 so we can run the installer via the following command.
sudo ~/Downloads/VMware-Workstation-Full-15.0.2-10952284.x86_64.bundle
The installation method of vmware workstation on centos is basically the same as on Ubuntu/Debian, however to make it easy for you i chose to re explain it again as you can understand it better this way.
The download link it’s the same for any Linux distro.
https://www.vmware.com/go/getworkstation-linux
Download the needed dependencies by running the following command.
yum install -y install gcc make linux-headers-$(uname -r) dkms
sudo chmod +x VMware-Workstation-Full-15.0.2-10952284.x86_64.bundle
sudo ~/Downloads/VMware-Workstation-Full-15.0.2-10952284.x86_64.bundle
The GUI of the VMware Workstation will come up once you run the above command.
Select “I want to try VMware Workstation 14 for 30 days” If you just want to try the software, or if you have a license key simply set the license key and click the ok button.
Enter your root password and click the “OK” button, and the GUI will show up as the image below.
In this tutorial you learned how to install VMware Workstation on Linux systems, and what VMware Workstation is. VMware Workstation it’s not the only way, and it’s not the only software that allows you to host/run multiple virtual machines on your system.