Increase resolution to 4K in VMware or Virtualbox

Question

I have a laptop with a 4K (3860×2160) display, but there are a lot of problems. A lot of virtualization programs aren't compatible with 4K resolution.

VMware Workstation and VirtualBox don't support 4K display in the list of the display's resolution. How I can set the resolution of the display in a virtual machine to 4K?

Solution 1

Both VirtualBox and VMWare should support 4K out of the box as long as the refresh rate is over 60Hz.

For an overview:

• Parallels 10 does a great job at 4K (but we're leaving due to their recent license changes)
• VirtualBox 5.x really stutters at 4K
• VMWare Fusion 8.x is good at 4K (7.x used to be really laggy at 4K)

Solution 2

Just give a try to VMware Workstation Technology Preview 2015.

This the "beta" version of Workstation 12. It supports officially highDPI displays.

I just tested it on a linux host with a 4K monitor and it supports this resolution pretty well.

Comments

[CharlesH]

Just a complete stab in the dark as I haven't got the pleasure of having a 4k display but it sounds like you are using the console windows of the virtual machine software. If using windows virtually can you not enable RDP and remote desktop to them instead which I believe in Windows 8.1 scales to 4k.

[Sydius]

I tried it with a Windows host with a 4k monitor and a Linux guest and it doesn't show up as an option.

[Sydius]

Actually, when I installed the VMWare tools in the guest, it supported 4k with 11 when I went full-screen. 4k is an option only when I go full screen, but that's what I want anyway.