VMware Workstation Reviews

We use VMware Workstation for cybersecurity features while testing virtual machines in our environment.

The platform’s most valuable feature is snapshot.

They could include official support for macOS virtualization within VMware Workstation.

I rate the platform’s scalability a ten out of ten.

I have worked with multiple virtual machine technologies. In terms of performance, VMware Workstation can be resource-intensive, particularly when compared to alternatives like Hyper-V or VirtualBox.

The initial setup is easy. However, it could be a learning curve for new users and require training. I rate the process a ten out of ten.

The platform saves much time as it snapshots the testing process for reuse across different environments. It proves crucial in a development workflow by allowing the creation of a base image. It takes snapshots at different development stages or scenarios, and teams can effortlessly switch back to specific points for testing. The snapshot functionality can isolate and manipulate guests independently, impacting only the host system.

It has sped up the project management process. We don’t have to go back and reinstall it from the beginning.

The cloning feature in VMware Workstation benefits operations such as penetration testing and ethical hacking. We can clone a box and ship it to the customer for easy deployment.

I rate it a nine out of ten.

We use VMware Workstation for testing and deploying applications in our production environment.

We use Hyper-V and VMware Workstation for our testing environment. We use it to deploy and test developer applications within our company. 

We run our internal applications on virtual machines to ensure compatibility with the Windows platform.

We deploy the tested applications to our production environment.

We use VMware products to support our IT infrastructure and application deployment processes.

I appreciate the ease of backup and snapshot creation. The ability to revert to previous versions without losing data is very useful for our team.

Since we've been using VMware Workstation for a while, I haven't had the opportunity to test other virtualization platforms. However, we have received some proposals for alternative solutions, such as SCI.

So, maybe VMware can consider introducing this in future releases. 

Moreover, I would like to see more detailed reporting capabilities, particularly around snapshot activity. It would be helpful to have a summary of changes made prior to deploying an application, allowing us to provide comprehensive reports to our management on a regular basis.

 We have been using this solution for three years now. We started using it in 2020. 

We haven't encountered any technical difficulties with VMware Workstation so far.

VMware Workstation is primarily used by the IT department. We haven't yet rolled it out to all employees.

We have around five end users using this solution in our company. 

We haven't had the need to contact VMware's support team directly.

I've always found the online community to be a valuable resource for addressing any concerns or questions.

We were using VirtualBox, an open-source virtualization software. The decision to use VMware Workstation was made by our technical team. They evaluated various virtualization solutions and determined that VMware Workstation was the best fit for our company's needs.

From a user perspective, the installation and deployment process was easy to understand and easy to deploy. Even for someone like me, who is not a fully technical person, it was manageable.

Our IT department handles all procurement and cost negotiations. They are responsible for evaluating proposals from vendors and selecting the most cost-effective solution.

I would recommend VMware Workstation for critical situations, such as deploying crucial applications within the company. It provides compatibility with a wide range of applications and ensures seamless testing and deployment.

Overall, I would rate the solution a nine out of ten. I'm satisfied with its features and performance, and I haven't encountered any major issues.

We use VMware Workstation for basic server management.

The product offers a cost-effective solution.

VMware Workstation’s most valuable features are backup and data transfer from one server to another.

They could work on the pricing model for the end users. It could be more affordable. There could be more integration with different tools.

We have been using VMware Workstation for a year. At present, we are using the version 17.

I rate the product’s stability a nine out of ten.

We have four VMware Workstation users in our organization. We use it 24/7. I rate its scalability a three out of ten. There is room for improvement. It does impact the workflow in terms of backup and restore.

The technical support team takes time to respond.

Neutral

The initial setup is straightforward. I rate the process an eight out of ten. The deployment involves setting up a server with the help of a system administrator.

We implement the product with our in-house team. It requires four executives for deployment and maintenance.

The product has a moderate price. There are no additional costs. I rate its pricing a six out of ten.

We evaluated Microsoft Hyper-V. It is an expensive product. So, we decided to go with VMware Workstation.

I recommend VMware Workstation and rate it an eight out of ten.

We use VMware Workstation to establish virtual machines. You can deploy it as Windows or Linux and use it as your computer.

I like that it's easy to use. It's easy to deploy virtual machines. You have to insert your ISO and the image of your OS and configure it. They provide a step-by-step guide, and you have to follow it. In the end, you have to start the machine, and that's all you have to do.

I liked that they synchronized the mouse, keyboard, and everything. When you finish the installation, it directly links to your laptop. This makes copying and pasting things from my laptop inside the virtual machine easy.

It would be better if software updates occur automatically.

I have been using VMware Workstation for about two or three years.

VMware Workstation is a stable solution.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give stability a ten.

We use VirtualBox at my company, and I use VMware Workstation for personal use. I switched to VMware Workstation because of the colors in the user interface. There is a difference in the ISO and how both products create software images.

The initial setup is straightforward. It's very user-friendly. The deployment time depends on the software image and the configuration. If it's small, it's really quick, like five minutes. The longest deployment I did was probably almost one hour. Large enterprises with a lot of virtual machines usually have a dedicated IT department to manage them. 

I implemented this solution. 

You need to pay for a license, but I don't think it costs that much. I think it's a one-time payment. 

I would tell potential users that they don't have to have any prior knowledge. They have to follow the prompts and fulfill the steps. I would recommend this solution; it's very user-friendly.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give VMware Workstation a ten.

I'm a teacher and I show it to students. I use the solution for virtualization for testing some systems and features in IT, for example, containers. 

The most valuable aspect is virtualization. It is very strong on workstations and PCs.

It is easy to implement the product.

There is a free version.

It's stable.

The solution is missing a snapshot feature.

The solution can be expensive.

It's not as easy to use as, for example, Oracle's Virtual Box.

I started using the solution 11 or 12 years ago. I've used it for a while at this point. 

I haven't had any stability issues. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze.

I have not noted any scalability at all with this product.

I also use Oracle Virtual Box. I use it more regularly. I now use Workstation very little. It's also less comfortable to use than Oracle. Both are easy to set up.

The implementation process of the solution is very straightforward and simple. It's not overly complex. 

I have it for personal use or just to teach and therefore I don't find it expensive. I use the free version. It's a bit expensive, the paid version. 

I'm an end-user.

Beyond the high cost, it is a very good product. I'd rate it eight out of ten.

We are using VMware Workstation for development purposes.

The most valuable feature of the VMware Workstation is the ease to create a development environment. When you have different ongoing developments, you often need to create a lot of different development environments. With this workstation solution, you can have a development environment for all the things you develop.

VMware Workstation could improve the export and import of virtual machines.

I have been using VMware Workstation for approximately 20 years.

VMware Workstation is stable.

VMware Workstation can be rolled out in any workstation. However, you don't scale it, you only install it on the workstations where you need it.

We have four or five people using this solution. We are a small company and when we first purchased the solution we had ten people using it at that time.

The support from VMware Workstation is reasonable.

I rate the support of VMware Workstation a three out of five.

Neutral

The setup of the VMware Workstation was simple.

We did the implementation of the solution in-house.

We have received a high ROI from using this solution.

The price of the solution per workstation is approximately 200 Francs annually. We pay a total of 800 francs. Everything is included in the price such as the support.

Back when we choose this solution 20 years ago there were not many virtualization tools available. There were Parallels and a few others.

I would recommend this solution to others.

I rate VMware Workstation a ten out of ten.

I am a system integrator and have experience with many different IT products. I regularly work with a lot of different technologies. Recently, I have been working on configuring VMware and virtualization. For example, I am considering upgrading the ESXi.

We run VMware Workstation locally. You can run it on AWS but that's not necessary for what we're doing. There are use cases where it will be applicable but I'm dealing with a construction company, as opposed to a heavily vested IT company. The use cases are quite a bit more laid back.

We primarily use it for virtualization. We image older systems, so we have a backup copy that's immediately accessible. Those are the major use cases.

Virtualization is awesome when you're running particular applications and you need to cookie-cutter them, which is what I'm doing. I've got the mining rig pre-built, and I just clone it, set the number of CPUs, and let it run. It can't get easier than that.

I would prefer running off of virtualization for everybody's computer. I would just load the images in them if I could, but that would be asking too much of the consumers, so I don't do stuff like that.

Having a user-friendly interface is important for me. I'm not a coder, even though I do a little bit of programming. Also, I don't use the command-line interface when I can avoid it. When I do have to use it, I look up what I'm supposed to type and then type it.

Virtualization in and of itself is the use case feature. We are able to simultaneously run multiple operating systems in a single machine and have virtually no performance hit. I've got 16 cores and 32 threads, so nobody cares if I use 24 of them for mining and use the rest of them for my desktop. It's basically like having a free computer. With all of the resources already paid for and running, why wouldn't you virtualize when you have that many cores? It doesn't make sense not to.

If you've only got four cores, then I would understand if you don't want to virtualize for that purpose. But if you do, why wouldn't you virtualize and have an unRAID server and a video-optimized system, and another one for something else? It just depends on what suit you want to wear that day.

Technical support is an area that needs improvement.

The interface is a little wonky and needs to be improved. Honestly, the biggest problem with VMware is not with their interface, as much as their support for the interface.

In order for a virtual machine to run on your system, you have to set the hardware up correctly. If it's an AMD, you need to have virtualization enabled on the CPU. That means going into the BIOS and making sure that your VX is set if it's Intel, or an AMDV is enabled. But, you don't actually find that on an AMD. Rather, you have to go to the SPV and check the box that's there. It would behoove VMware as a company to have better documentation that shows people how to do all of this setup.

It wasn't too big of a deal for me to figure it out because I've been working with it, but I could imagine that someone who's not familiar with the BIOS and not familiar with SPV could get into a lot of trouble just to set it up for virtualization. That's unfortunate. I'm not saying they should make the interface overly simple to use. I'm just saying that they should make their documentation easy to access for the stuff that you need. Specifically, if you're in an area of the application, it should have an information link that goes into detail and sub-detail at that point. That would be good.

I understand the segmentation of different markets that they're trying to achieve in terms of sales, but it would be really nice if they just enabled you to scale. You're limited to a certain number of threads as it is now. It might be 32 threads or 32 CPUs max on VMware Workstation. ESXi can go to 128 or even 700-and-something if you scale it up to vSphere. However, it would be nice if someone purchased VMware and then was able to add those feature sets onto it. That's how their software's actually built. It's all VMware Workstation, yet depending on the configuration and how much you pay, some can allocate 738 CPUs and other ones can only do 32.

I have been working with VMware Workstation for 15 years.

They're very stable. VMware is remarkable in this regard. Given how well it works, I think that it's insane that people are doing it any other way.

I ran a miner in Windows directly, and it would occupy all of the cores and slow down the computer and cause a ton of problems. Interestingly, it wouldn't yield as much as this virtualized Linux system would in Windows, on the same machine.

I'm not sure how it makes sense that a virtualized machine inside Windows works better than something where you eliminate the middle man and you just run it in Windows, but that's exactly the case.

When you run these virtualized systems, they're running on bare iron, pretty much. They may be in Windows, and Windows might be using other stuff, but they're going to the CPU and saying, "This one, this one, this one, this one is mine," and it just runs.

This means that you get all of the performance advantages of Linux, and none of the overhead of Microsoft spying on you. This is why I think that building every computer out there as a baseline virtualized machine makes a lot more sense. You just press a button on your keyboard, and there's your Windows. Press another one, there's your Mac. Press another one, there's your Linux. Have them all be able to swap files back and forth, and everybody could be having the best of all possible worlds for whatever kind of system they want. Ultimately, Linux would grow and win out.

However, as it is, you give them a bunch of money and they tend to develop theirs a little faster. Linux may be the best system in terms of efficiencies because it's monetized to do so. All of those companies with all Linux servers know that by cutting away the fat, they make the thing work better and they earn more money with the hardware they've spent so much money on. That's the financial incentive.

The technical support is good, although it could be better.

I would rate them a three out of five.

I have experience with some similar products. For example, Cisco has one that you can use for free. VMware is what I've been primarily using for the past five years.

I choose to work with VMware because I like the interface and its support for development. I also keep up to date with the most recent versions. For example, there was an update that happened this morning.

The initial setup is straightforward.

The installation is really easy, aside from little issues that it doesn't necessarily tell you when you're cloning something. For example, it may not point out which thing to click on but you can reasonably guess because it's at the top of the list, and it works.

I'm still in the process of tweaking the miners, so optimizing the system is an ongoing process. With this particular software, things change depending on the situation with the mining because you're working on a large network.

It takes about 15 to 20 minutes to clone the system once you've got the image done. The image that I made yesterday, I probably spent an hour or so setting up, and then I can cookie cutter. However, I'm continuing to look into how to optimize it for the number of CPUs, whether two processors with six cores are better than one processor with 12 cores, etc.

The licensing costs are cheap. I pay approximately $100 per year.

That said, I'm not doing anything major. If I had vSphere and multiple servers, and I was loading up 700 processes, then it would be a different story. However, I'm not at that level.

The reason that I chose and continue to like VMware is that it's a commercial product and it's funded and it develops and they're improving it. I love open-source, but I understand that some levels of development are more easily attained when there's a monetary incentive behind it.

Overall, this is a good product and I recommend it. My advice for anybody who is considering VMware Workstation is to go ahead and implement it. That said, there is always room for improvement.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

I use VMware Player for testing purposes. For example, if I want to test something on a non-Windows operating system, I would install Ubuntu or Linux, and I can do the testing with the solution.

VMware Player helps you to virtualize and install Ubuntu or any other operating system, even on a Windows laptop. You can test your application using VMware Player.

VMware Player should provide a cloud version with no limitations to hardware resources.

VMware has cloud solutions, but something more can be done at the desktop level.

I have been using VMware Player for eight years now.

VMware Player’s stability is above my expectations.

VMware Player is a scalable solution. The solution helped me a lot in my career progression.

More than 100 users use VMware Player in our organization. Our organization's IT infrastructure team uses VMware Player for testing purposes. We have some trainees or interns who have just completed their graduation, and if they want to test something, we recommend they try this solution.

I rate VMware Player ten out of ten for scalability.

We have had VMware Player enterprise support for five years, and it's doing great. Whenever we call them, they are readily available for us. We also get on-site support from VMware. In terms of customer support, VMware is the best.

You can install VMware Player by going to the VMware website and downloading it.

The solution's pricing depends on how many licenses you are using. VMware Player's pricing is competitive to other vendors in the market, like AWS or Google Cloud. The solution's pricing is almost the same as what Google Cloud, AWS, or Microsoft would charge you.

We have a license for VMware Workstation Player.

Overall, I rate VMware Player ten out of ten.