System requirements for Microsoft Defender Application Guard

Note

Microsoft Defender Application Guard, including the Windows Isolated App Launcher APIs, will be deprecated for Microsoft Edge for Business and will no longer be updated. Please download the Microsoft Edge For Business Security Whitepaper to learn more about Edge for Business security capabilities.

The threat landscape is continually evolving. While hackers are busy developing new techniques to breach enterprise networks by compromising workstations, phishing schemes remain one of the top ways to lure employees into social engineering attacks. Microsoft Defender Application Guard is designed to help prevent old, and newly emerging attacks, to help keep employees productive.

Note

Given the technological complexity, the security promise of Microsoft Defender Application Guard (MDAG) may not hold true on VMs and in VDI environments. Hence, MDAG is currently not officially supported on VMs and in VDI environments. However, for testing and automation purposes on non-production machines, you may enable MDAG on a VM by enabling Hyper-V nested virtualization on the host.

Hardware requirements

Your environment must have the following hardware to run Microsoft Defender Application Guard.

Note

Application Guard currently isn't supported on Windows 11 ARM64 devices.

Hardware Description
64-bit CPU A 64-bit computer with minimum four cores (logical processors) is required for hypervisor and virtualization-based security (VBS). For more info about Hyper-V, see Hyper-V on Windows Server 2016 or Introduction to Hyper-V on Windows 10. For more info about hypervisor, see Hypervisor Specifications.
CPU virtualization extensions Extended page tables, also called Second Level Address Translation (SLAT)

AND

One of the following virtualization extensions for VBS:
VT-x (Intel)
OR
AMD-V

Hardware memory Microsoft requires a minimum of 8-GB RAM
Hard disk 5-GB free space, solid state disk (SSD) recommended
Input/Output Memory Management Unit (IOMMU) support Not required, but recommended

Software requirements

Your environment must have the following software to run Microsoft Defender Application Guard.

Software Description
Operating system Windows 10 Enterprise or Education editions, version 1809 or later
Windows 10 Professional edition, version 1809 or later (only standalone mode is supported)
Windows 11 Education or Enterprise editions
Windows 11 Professional edition (only Standalone mode is supported)
Browser Microsoft Edge
Management system
(only for managed devices)
Microsoft Intune

OR

Microsoft Configuration Manager

OR

Group Policy

OR

Your current, company-wide, non-Microsoft mobile device management (MDM) solution. For info about non-Microsoft MDM solutions, see the documentation that came with your product.