Besides going free, VMware Workstation Pro finally stops hogging your CPU due to NAT

If you are a VMware user, it has probably been a great day for you so far. A senior product manager at the company, earlier today, published detailed guides on how to download and install the Workstation Pro and Fusion Pro for free following the announcement of the same. Besides that, a guide on how to migrate from Workstation or Fusion Player to Pro was also put up.

However, going free is not the only great news that the app brings with this release. The latest version also fixes a high CPU usage bug that was related to VMware NAT Service (vmnat.exe), wherein Windows Task Manager would report close to 100% usage on some of the cores, and this happened even when VMware was not running. Users have been reporting about it since last year.

The issue has now finally been resolved with the latest version. The full release notes are given below:

What's New

 

• This release introduces product enhancements to support a new commercial subscription and personal use license model. For more information, see Learn Subscription.
• This release resolves CVE-2024-22267, CVE-2024-22268, CVE-2024-22269, and CVE-2024-22270. For more information on these vulnerabilities and their impact on VMware products, see VMSA-2024-0010.
• This release contains security and bug fixes.

 

Known Issues

 

• The multi-monitor feature might not work correctly in specific topologies

In specific situations, based on different hardware and topologies, the multi-monitor feature does not work as expected. You might see issues like reverting the topology to a single screen, or not cycling through monitors.

 

Workaround: None.

 

Resolved Issues

 

• VMware NAT Service uses high CPU even with no virtual machine running

 

On Workstation Pro 17.5.0 and 17.5.1, vmnat.exe might have high CPU utilization even when no virtual machine is running.

 

This issue is resolved.

 

• Security Issues

 

OpenSSL, which is consumed by OVF Tool, is updated to version 1.0.2zj.

For those wondering, the NAT or the Network Address Translation device operates as a Domain Name System (DNS) proxy that transmits DNS requests from a virtual machine to a host-recognized DNS server. A NAT device essentially allows accessing an external network from a virtual machine.

Source: VMware

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