Turn On or Off Microsoft Defender Application Guard in Windows 10

xy677 · 04 Jan 2018

I would *love* to enable this feature and give it a try but I rely on VMware Workstation every single day (and am not willing to use HyperV for my VMs) so will I ever be able to use WDAG with VMware Workstation installed as well?

Cliff S · 14 Apr 2018

Another interesting find Shawn.
In C:\Windows\Containers there are two .wim files of Windows.

Turn On or Off Microsoft Defender Application Guard in Windows 10-image-002.png

Maybe to be mounted as a sandbox pseudo VM`?

Brink · 14 Apr 2018

Not sure, but it would be interesting to find more official info about "WindowsDefenderApplicationGuard.wim".

Cliff S · 14 Apr 2018

Brink said:

Not sure, but it would be interesting to find more official info about "WindowsDefenderApplicationGuard.wim".

,wim's are @Kari's specialty, maybe he could create a VM with both.

AndreTen · 14 Apr 2018

Cliff S said:

Another interesting find Shawn.
In C:\Windows\Containers there are two .wim files of Windows.

Maybe to be mounted as a sandbox pseudo VM`?

Brink said:

Not sure, but it would be interesting to find more official info about "WindowsDefenderApplicationGuard.wim".

This could be for :

Turn On or Off Microsoft Defender Application Guard in Windows 10-image.png

Cliff S · 14 Apr 2018

AndreTen said:

This could be for :

I bet you're right Andre.
Windows keeps features compressed until they are turned on, either at OOBE or later by the user.
And .wim is basically a glorified zip format.

mikiep · 06 May 2018

I enabled it for about a hour or two and mainly watched heating on the cpu as I browsed around. CPU heats up faster and higher when loading a new page and maybe when actively browsing it stays up a slight amount but cools to normal when sitting and just reading a webpage. Didn't notice any added slowness to page loadings - and then finally simply reimaged my system to clean it all out because mainly it wont allow browser extensions and I need my adblocker.

I didn't enable the Hyper-V in programs & features yet it seems to work as described.
It built a folder "C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\HVSI" showing about 3.5gb containing two .vhx type virtual files, yet my C;\ showed it had increased only about 1gb in total used space.

Was surprised I had to manually switch to the secured edge, thought it would automatically open everything into it. Didn't take the time to investigate the group policy settings before ending my test drive.

Cliff S · 31 Mar 2019

Decided to finally try it out, and it won't start, I keep getting this, and in Feedback hub there are many, many others like me.

WDAG Report - Container: Error: 0x80070057, Ext error: 0x00000001; RDP: Error: 0x00000000, Ext error: 0x00000000 Location: 0x00000000

Cliff S · 20 Apr 2019

I'm still getting errors when trying to open a WDAG window

I have it turned on, of course using the tutorial, that installed it, but it hangs at 50% then the error.
I then opened GPEdit and "Enabled" it there too, but still get an error when opening a window

Paste into Feedback Hub and you can see all the posts about this:
WDAG Report - Container: Error: 0x80070057, Ext error: 0x00000001; RDP: Error: 0x00000000, Ext error: 0x00000000 Location: 0x00000000

Any ideas Shawn?
I'm not using any 3rd party AV, only Defender.
I did have a problem getting Core Isolation to work through the UI before, but RegEdit got that turned on.

I'm starting to wonder if there Is a compatibility problem with the 9900K(maybe 8th Gen CPU's in general maybe) memory controller and Win10's advanced virtualization security options(not with Hyper-V VMs though), as they have hardware based changes to how the 3 levels of cache are handled for Spectre & Meltdown.

Brink · 20 Apr 2019

Hey Cliff,

It sounds like it may be a bug. Might send feedback to Microsoft about it to help make them aware in case others are having the same issue.