So I’m trying to create some documentation around our VMware template build process and I’m starting from a freshly built Windows 10 system with all patches as of December 2019. Our process uses Hashicorp Packer to automate the build of our Red Hat VM templates using VMware Workstation 15.5 running a Bash script under Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). It is a bit more complex than I wanted, but ultimately we want this to run in a fully automated process on a Linux build server so WSL is a good bridge.
Today when I was going through our pre-requisite setup steps, my fresh VMware installation would throw an error pop-up message:
Googling for an answer, I found a lot of one-off solutions but none of them worked. After searching for most of the day, I came across this YouTube video by Britec09 : https://youtu.be/VIBdY-5zr58
I usually don’t sit through YouTube videos for issues such as these, but this time I was getting desperate for an answer.
And Mr. Britec09 came through!
To cut to the chase, the steps he provided were all similar or identical to others I had found, except his ran in this order and all at once seemed to be my solution.
To save time if this happens to me again, here are the steps as he included them in his YouTube notes.
NOTE: Please be careful – many of these tools used below will permit you to accidentally break your system.
Step 1. – In the search box type “gpedit” then Goto – Computer Configuration – Administrative Templates – System – Device Guard – Turn on Virtualization Based Security.
Double click that option and choose “Disable”
Step 2. In search box, type Turn Windows features on or off, then uncheck Hyper-V and restart system.
Step 3. Open Registry Editor by typing regedit in the search box. Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\DeviceGuard. Right-click in the right panel, add a new DWORD value named EnableVirtualizationBasedSecurity and set it to 0 to disable it.
Next Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\LSA. Right-click and add a new DWORD value named LsaCfgFlags and set it to 0 to disable it.
Step 4. Open command prompt as a administrator and type the following commands
bcdedit /create {0cb3b571-2f2e-4343-a879-d86a476d7215} /d "DebugTool" /application osloader
Then copy paste the rest below and press enter – there are four lines of commands, each beginning with “bcedit”.
bcdedit /set {0cb3b571-2f2e-4343-a879-d86a476d7215} path "\EFI\Microsoft\Boot\SecConfig.efi"
bcdedit /set {bootmgr} bootsequence {0cb3b571-2f2e-4343-a879-d86a476d7215}
bcdedit /set {0cb3b571-2f2e-4343-a879-d86a476d7215} loadoptions DISABLE-LSA-ISO,DISABLE-VBS
bcdedit /set hypervisorlaunchtype off
Step 5. If all of that worked without any errors, reboot your system and re-try VMware Workstation.