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Configuring Sound in VMware Workstation

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VMware Workstation provides a Creative Labs Sound Blaster 16 compatible audio device and supports sound in Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows Me, Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows .NET Server and Linux guest operating systems. The VMware Workstation sound device is disabled by default and must be enabled with the Configuration Editor (Settings > Configuration Editor). Sound support is currently limited to PCM (pulse code modulation) output (that is, any application that produces sound without using MIDI).

Setting Up a Virtual Sound Card on a Windows Host

1. Be sure your physical sound card is installed and configured properly on the Windows host operating system. Refer to the documentation for your particular Windows operating system. You may need to install additional software on your system to support sound. VMware cannot provide support assistance in configuring sound on your host operating system. Please contact your host operating system support provider or sound card manufacturer for help.
2. Add a virtual sound adapter to the virtual machine. By default, the virtual sound adapter is not installed in the virtual machine.
3. In the Configuration Editor (Settings > Configuration Editor), click Add. The Add Hardware Wizard appears.
4. Select Sound Adapter, then click Next.

   If you have more than one physical sound adapter in your host computer, you can choose which one to connect to the virtual sound adapter. You can also choose whether the virtual sound adapter should be connected when the virtual machine starts.

5. Click Finish.
6. Click OK to close the Configuration Editor.
7. Configure the guest operating system to use the VMware Workstation virtual sound adapter. This adapter is compatible with a Creative Labs Sound Blaster 16.

Setting Up a Virtual Sound Card on a Linux Host

1. Be sure your physical sound card is installed and configured properly on the Linux host operating system. Refer to the documentation for your particular Linux operating system. You may need to install additional software on your system to support sound. VMware cannot provide support assistance in configuring sound on your host operating system. Please contact your host operating system support provider or sound card manufacturer for help.
2. Add a virtual sound adapter to the virtual machine. By default, the virtual sound adapter is not installed in the virtual machine.
3. In the Configuration Editor (Settings > Configuration Editor), click Sound.
4. Provide the device name in the Device field. Type in or browse to the device that represents your sound card (for example, /dev/dsp).
5. Click the Install button, then click OK to save the configuration and close the Configuration Editor.

Setting Up Sound in the Guest Operating System

Use your guest operating system's configuration tools to set up the virtual sound adapter.

Sound in a Windows XP or Windows .NET Server Guest

1. Click the Printers and Other Hardware link in the Windows XP or Windows .NET Server Control Panel (Start > Control Panel).
2. In the See Also pane, click Add Hardware, then click Next.
3. Select Yes, I have already connected the hardware, then click Next.
4. In the Installed Hardware list, select Add a new hardware device, then click Next.
5. Select Install the hardware that I manually select from a list (Advanced), then click Next.
6. Select Sound, video and game controllers, then click Next.
7. Select Creative Technology Ltd. in the Manufacturer list and Sound Blaster 16 or AWE32 or compatible (WDM) in the list of devices, then click Next.
8. Click Next.
9. Click Finish.

Sound in a Windows 2000 Guest

1. Double-click the Add/Remove Hardware icon in the Windows 2000 Control Panel (Start > Settings > Control Panel).
2. In the Add/Remove Hardware Wizard dialog box, select Add a New Device and click Next.
3. In the Find New Hardware dialog box, select No, I want to select the hardware from a list and click Next.
4. In the Hardware Type dialog box, select Sound, video and game controllers from the list and click Next.
5. In the Select a Device Driver dialog box, select Creative from the manufacturers list and select Sound Blaster 16 or AWE32 or compatible (WDM) from the models list, then click Next.
6. In the Start Hardware Installation dialog box, click Next to install the Sound Blaster 16 drivers.
7. In the Completing the Add/Remove Hardware Wizard dialog box, click Finish and reboot the virtual machine. Sound should be working the next time the virtual machine boots Windows 2000.

Sound in a Windows NT Guest

If you have never installed a Sound Blaster 16 Card in this Windows NT system, you need a Windows NT 4.0 installation CD-ROM.

1. Go to the Windows NT Control Panel (Start > Settings > Control Panel).
2. Double-click the Multimedia icon.
3. Click the Devices tab.
4. Click the Add button.
5. Select the Creative Labs Sound Blaster 1.X, Pro, 16, then click OK.
6. Insert the Windows NT 4.0 CD-ROM in the CD-ROM drive when prompted.
7. Specify D:I386 (where D: is your CD-ROM drive), then click OK.
8. Configure the Sound Blaster base I/O Address.

   0x220

   Click OK.

9. Complete the Sound Blaster 16 Configuration.

   8-bit DMA	MPU-401 I/O address
   1	Disable (MPU-401 MIDI device is not supported)

   Click OK.

10. When prompted to restart, click Restart Now.

Sound in a Windows 95 or Windows 98 Guest

If you have never installed a Sound Blaster 16 Card in this Windows guest operating system, you need a Windows 95 or Windows 98 installation CD-ROM.

1. Double-click the Add New Hardware icon in the Windows Control Panel (Start > Settings > Control Panel).

   Click Next.

2. Select Yes for Do you want Windows to search for new hardware?

   Click Next.

3. Click Next again. Windows runs the autodetection and says it is ready to finish.
4. If prompted to do so, insert the Windows CD-ROM into the drive and click OK.

   Click Finish.

If you have problems with Windows autodetection, add the device manually.

1. Double-click the Add New Hardware icon in the Windows Control Panel (Start > Settings > Control Panel).

   Click Next.

2. Select No for Do you want Windows to search for new hardware?

   Click Next.

3. Select Sound, video and games controllers.

   Click Next.

4. Select Creative Labs Sound Blaster 16 or AWE-32.

   Click Next.

   Click Finish.

Sound in a Linux Guest

1. Refer to the documentation for your particular Linux distribution. You may need to install additional software packages on your system to support sound.
2. When configuring the sound, please use the following parameters:

   IRQ	16-bit DMA
   5	7

Known Limitations of Sound Support in VMware Workstation

Sound support is provided for Sound Blaster compatible PCM (pulse code modulation) output. This gives you the ability to play .wav, .au and Real Audio formats, among others.

MIDI sound is not supported.

Game ports and devices such as joysticks attached to game ports are not supported.

Sound does not work well with certain games, especially fast, interactive games.

Improving Sound Performance

If you notice that sound skips in your guest operating system, you may try adding two variables to your virtual machine's configuration file (.vmx on Windows hosts, .cfg on Linux hosts). These variables are sound.maxLength and sound.smallBlockSize.

VMware cannot provide you with specific settings to use; how these settings affect your sound quality depends on many factors, including your environment and the way you are employing sound. But here are some general rules of thumb to use when setting these variables:

• Set these values to powers of 2, such as 64, 128 or 512.
• To overcome skipping, setting these values lower than 512 should help.
• The sound.maxLength setting should be greater than or equal to the sound.smallBlockSize setting.

When you configure a virtual machine, you can add network adapters (NICs) and specify the adapter type.

Network Adapter Types

The type of network adapters that are available depend on the following factors:

• The virtual machine compatibility, which depends on the host that created or most recently updated it.
• Whether the virtual machine compatibility has been updated to the latest version for the current host.
• The guest operating system.

Supported NICs currently differ between an on-premises environment and VMware Cloud on AWS. The following NIC types are supported in an on-premises deployment:

E1000E

Emulated version of the Intel 82574 Gigabit Ethernet NIC. E1000E is the default adapter for Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012.

E1000

Emulated version of the Intel 82545EM Gigabit Ethernet NIC, with drivers available in most newer guest operating systems, including Windows XP and later and Linux versions 2.4.19 and later.

Flexible

Identifies itself as a Vlance adapter when a virtual machine boots, but initializes itself and functions as either a Vlance or a VMXNET adapter, depending on which driver initializes it. With VMware Tools installed, the VMXNET driver changes the Vlance adapter to the higher performance VMXNET adapter.

Vlance

Emulated version of the AMD 79C970 PCnet32 LANCE NIC, an older 10 Mbps NIC with drivers available in 32-bit legacy guest operating systems. A virtual machine configured with this network adapter can use its network immediately.

VMXNET

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Optimized for performance in a virtual machine and has no physical counterpart. Because operating system vendors do not provide built-in drivers for this card, you must install VMware Tools to have a driver for the VMXNET network adapter available.

VMXNET 2 (Enhanced)

Based on the VMXNET adapter but provides high-performance features commonly used on modern networks, such as jumbo frames and hardware offloads. VMXNET 2 (Enhanced) is available only for some guest operating systems on ESX/ ESXi 3.5 and later.

VMXNET 3

A paravirtualized NIC designed for performance. VMXNET 3 offers all the features available in VMXNET 2 and adds several new features, such as multiqueue support (also known as Receive Side Scaling in Windows), IPv6 offloads, and MSI/MSI-X interrupt delivery. VMXNET 3 is not related to VMXNET or VMXNET 2.

PVRDMA

A paravirtualized NIC that supports remote direct memory access (RDMA) between virtual machines through the OFED verbs API. All virtual machines must have a PVRDMA device and should be connected to a distributed switch. PVRDMA supports VMware vSphere vMotion and snapshot technology. It is available in virtual machines with hardware version 13 and guest operating system Linux kernel 4.6 and later.

For information about assigning an PVRDMA network adapter to a virtual machine, see the vSphere Networking documentation.

SR-IOV passthrough

Representation of a virtual function (VF) on a physical NIC with SR-IOV support. The virtual machine and the physical adapter exchange data without using the VMkernel as an intermediary. This adapter type is suitable for virtual machines where latency might cause failure or that require more CPU resources.

SR-IOV passthrough is available in ESXi 6.0 and later for guest operating systems Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 and later, and Windows Server 2008 R2 with SP2. An operating system release might contain a default VF driver for certain NICs, while for others you must download and install it from a location provided by the vendor of the NIC or of the host.

For information about assigning an SR-IOV passthrough network adapter to a virtual machine, see the vSphere Networking Reaching your audience with social media. documentation.

For network adapter compatibility considerations, see the VMware Compatibility Guide at http://www.vmware.com/resources/compatibility.

Legacy Network Adapters and ESXi Virtual Hardware Versions

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The default network adapter types for all legacy virtual machines depend on the adapters available and compatible to the guest operating system and the version of virtual hardware on which the virtual machine was created.

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If you do not upgrade a virtual machine to use a virtual hardware version, your adapter settings remain unchanged. If you upgrade your virtual machine to take advantage of newer virtual hardware, your default adapter settings will likely change to be compatible with the guest operating system and upgraded host hardware.

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To verify the network adapters that are available to your supported guest operating system for a particular version of vSphere ESXi, see the VMware Compatibility Guide at http://www.vmware.com/resources/compatibility.