Apparently Microsoft has just released a new tech preview of Windows 8 ... oh, wait. Sorry, I meant 8.1 (I guess all the cool kids now have a dot one in their release names ;)) I am not exactly sure what is new in this release, but I have been hearing rumors about some start menu thing?

For those of you who are interested in trying out the new Windows 8.1 Preview, you can easily run it on the latest version of vSphere which is 5.1 Update 1 which officially supports Windows 8. To create the VM, you just need to select the latest virtual hardware version which is 9 and Windows 8 (64 or 32 bit) as the guestOS type.

Here is a screenshot of Windows 8.1 Preview running in my home lab environment:

In addition to the OS, I have also successfully installed VMware Tools, VMXNET3 network driver and an HD Sound Card to the new Windows 8.1 VM and everything seems to be running fine without any issues.

Note: You should also be able to run Windows 8.1 Preview on latest version of VMware Fusion and Workstation, but this is not something I have tested.

Well, now that I am done sharing it is time to delete this VM. I need my home lab resources for more important things 🙂