I discovered this error when I was testing a customization procedure for a client. I had created a guest VM on my local workstation and when I tried to start it I got this error:

I’ve had this Windows 10 system with VMWare Workstation Professional v15 for almost a year now. Although I had never seen this error before, the link to the VMWare documentation appeared useful at first. However, the VMWare documentation itself was less than useful, as was the link to the relevant Microsoft documentation.

After reading the process I was expected to follow to remediate the problem, I started to get concerned. The resolution required editing the registry on my business laptop. Not a desirable undertaking during the Covid 19 pandemic. The risk of crippling my only connection to many of my customers was not ideal.

I started looking for a more reasonable solution. I came across a post on the VMWare Technology Network about halfway through the comments that led me to a more reasonable solution: Disable the Hypervisor and reboot the system. This worked perfectly from an Administrator Command Prompt:

Just reboot the system and you are back in business.

You can read a similar and more descriptive article about this on Ivo Beerens blog.

To re-enable the Hypervisor:

After rebooting the system, the Hypervisor will be re-enabled and VMWorkstation is disabled again.

Update: May 2020

Shortly after I wrote this post VMWare announced support for Hyper-V mode in VMWare Workstation 15.5.5. Now the simplest solution is to upgrade!