VMware Workstation Pro 25H2 with USB 3.2 and New Virtual Hardware
Broadcom has released VMware Workstation Pro 25H2. New features include USB 3.2, virtual hardware version 22, and additional Linux distributions.
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- Moritz Förster
Broadcom has released VMware Workstation Pro 25H2 (Build 24995812). The new version of the desktop hypervisor brings extended hardware support and support for current Linux distributions. Among the most important innovations is support for USB generation 3.2, which allows external SSDs, for example, to be fully utilized in virtual machines.
With virtual hardware version 22, Broadcom introduces a new abstraction layer that provides more modern hardware features for guest systems. Also new is the detection of Hyper-V and the Windows Hypervisor Platform (WHP), which is intended to improve compatibility when running different virtualization software in parallel.
The list of supported guest operating systems is expanded to include Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10, Fedora Linux 42, openSUSE Leap 16.0 (RC), SUSE Linux 16 (Beta), Debian 13, Oracle Linux 10, and VMware ESX 9.0. RHEL 10, Fedora 42, openSUSE Leap 16.0 (RC), SUSE Linux 16 (Beta), and Debian 13 are added as host systems.
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Bug fixes and removed features
The developers have fixed several bugs, including crashes when exiting in full-screen mode under Linux, incorrect event viewer messages under Windows, and performance issues during support bundle collection. 3D acceleration with Intel's Meteor Lake GPUs (Core Ultra 100) under Linux should also now function correctly. Furthermore, the vctl utility is no longer part of Workstation Pro. VMware had previously provided the command-line tool for container operations.
When installing Windows 11, network problems may occur when using NAT mode. As a workaround, Broadcom recommends switching to bridge mode during installation. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 also has limitations: with 3D acceleration enabled, the installation freezes with a gray screen.
VMware Workstation Pro is free for any use since the end of 2024. At the same time, Broadcom announced that the software would not be discontinued – a statement that many observers doubted. Details of all changes can be found in the official release notes.
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