3.2 Install the hypervisor
Fair warning before you start: the download is the annoying part, not the install. Since Broadcom bought VMware, getting the free installer requires creating a free Broadcom account and navigating a portal that was clearly designed for enterprise procurement rather than for you. Budget fifteen minutes of mild irritation. It's still worth it, and it's a one-time toll.
Get VMware Workstation Pro
First, a free Broadcom account. Register at support.broadcom.com, confirm your email, and log in. Nothing below is visible to a logged-out visitor, so do this part first even though it feels like a detour.
Then the portal, which is where people give up. The route to the free installer is not something you can reason your way to, because Workstation now sits behind a menu entry named after an entirely different product.
Broadcom rearranges this site, so treat the steps as a snapshot of one working route rather than a permanent map.
- In the menu down the left-hand side, choose VMware Cloud Foundation. That is genuinely where the desktop products live, and no, nothing on the page tells you that.
- Click My Downloads.
- Find the text link reading Free Software Downloads available HERE and click it. This is the step people miss, and missing it is exactly how you end up on pages demanding entitlements and contract numbers.
- Type Workstation into the search box and choose VMware Workstation Pro.
- Choose your operating system, Windows or Linux, and take the newest release listed. Don't copy a version number from this page or any other; take the top of the list on the day you download.
- Tick I agree to the Terms and Conditions. The download button does nothing at all until you do, and it does not tell you why.
- Click the download icon.
If the portal has been rearranged since this was written, search the product name from your logged-in session and look for wording about free or personal downloads. If you land somewhere asking about entitlements or contracts, you are on the enterprise side of the house: back out and search again. And if it becomes a fight, take the VirtualBox path below. It runs this whole course.
Then install it:
- Run the installer with its defaults. Decline the trial-of-extras prompts if any appear; the free product is the product.
- Launch it once and confirm you get the main window. If it asks about a license, choose the personal/free use option.
Windows may ask to reboot after install. Let it.
VirtualBox skips the portal saga entirely: download it from virtualbox.org, install with defaults, and also install the matching Extension Pack from the same page (it adds USB and other conveniences the lab will want).
If Windows complains about another hypervisor
On some Windows machines, the first VM you ever boot will be slow or the tool will warn about Hyper-V or "virtualization-based security." That's Windows itself quietly using the virtualization hardware for its own security features, and two hypervisors are now sharing one CPU feature. Modern Workstation versions cooperate with it and run anyway, just with a performance tax. If your VMs later feel sluggish out of proportion to your hardware, search your Windows version's settings for Memory integrity (under Core isolation) and know that turning it off trades a Windows hardening feature for VM speed. That's a real trade with a real cost; I'm telling you the lever exists, not pulling it for you.
Prove it works
Open the application. You don't need to build anything yet; that's lesson 3.4. For today, success is the main window opening without errors and a File > New Virtual Machine menu item that's clickable. If the app instead complains that virtualization is disabled, revisit checkpoint 0.6: the firmware setting didn't take, and the fix is the BIOS trip described there.