Windows Device Guard and Credential Guard

I enabled Windows Device Guard and Credential Guard at a windows 10 host. The result was that VMWare Player/Workstation and VirtualBox ceased to work. For instance, VMWare Player complains,

VMware Payer and Device/Credential Guard are not compatible. 

VMware Player can be run after disabling Device/Credential Guard.

The error message also provided a URL to a VMWare Knowledge Base article. Following the article, the best solution is actually to use the Windows Defender Device Guard and Windows Defender Credential Guard hardware readiness tool to disable the Device and Credential Guard. The tool is distributed as a zip archive. Having extracted it, we simply issue the following command in the PowerShell session,

DG_Readiness_Tool_v3.6.ps1 -Disable -AutoReboot

You may revise the above command to match the version of the tool downloaded.

Windows Defender Interferes with PostgreSQL on Windows 10

I am running a PostgreSQL database server on a Windows 10 host for development. I noticed that Windows Defender sometimes interferes with PostgreSQL and results the PostgreSQL services being terminated.

More specifically,  when you have a database transaction running and the Windows Defender starts to scan, the Windows Defender would label PostgreSQL transaction log as a threat as illustrated in the screenshot captured below. It shows that Windows Defender labels a PostgreSQL transaction log as a "Exploit:HTML/IframeRef", which is clearly a false alarm. Windows Defender would next quarantines the threat and the transaction log becomes inaccessible to the PostgreSQL service.

If you examine services in the Windows 10 host, you will see that the PostgreSQL service is terminated as illustrated in the screenshot below. At this time, any query to the PostgreSQL database results in failure.

The solution is to exclude the PostgreSQL transaction log directory from Windows Defender's scan. Microsoft explains how this can be done in this page.