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Cisco VXI vs VMware Workstation comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Cisco VXI
Ranking in Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI)
23rd
Average Rating
7.0
Number of Reviews
1
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
VMware Workstation
Ranking in Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI)
3rd
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
5.7
Number of Reviews
57
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2026, in the Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) category, the mindshare of Cisco VXI is 1.4%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Workstation is 9.1%, down from 14.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
VMware Workstation9.1%
Cisco VXI1.4%
Other89.5%
Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI)
 

Featured Reviews

Sina Ghozati - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Solution Specialist at Arrow Electronics
Straightforward implementation, scalable, but performance could improve
When using Cisco VXI in virtual environments there tends to be a lot of bugs with files you have to deploy across the virtual environment. You configure for hours, and then there is a bug that stops you, and you notice that you wasted hours. There's always room for improvement with these virtual environments because you're not dealing with the actual equipment, you're dealing with a virtual version of it that you have to install in a virtual environment. The performance of Cisco VXI could improve. It requires a lot of hardware and even if you install it on a server it is heavy on resources.
GC
Director of IT at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees
Creating and destroying test machines has simplified our operations and reduced manual recovery time
The Snapshot feature has helped with workflows by allowing us to more easily reconstruct something if we lose it or need it. We've been making Snapshots on a consistent basis, mainly of servers. The VX Rail has worked effectively because we can create machines as we need them. It's helpful for resetting and has helped with our operations because I had set up failover servers on Vertex, but we don't have to do that anymore since VMware will just create a new machine immediately if we have a problem. We're doing our domain servers on there, and we've been very happy with that. We appreciate that we can create machines simply to test things out and then destroy them. I use it for a test machine for checking emails, so if the email has a virus in it, we can just destroy the machine and create a new one. We're slowly moving into the VMware environment, although the pricing with Broadcom has been a disaster.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"The solution has been doing a good job for us."
"The initial setup of Cisco VXI is straightforward."
"VM management - ability to very easily create and manage multiple VMs of various platforms, with portability and ease of saving and copying entire VMs from machine to machine."
"VMware Workstation made various enhancements to the system once the deployment was completed."
"VMware Workstation works correctly and has more features compared to Oracle VirtualBox."
"We are able to simultaneously run multiple operating systems in a single machine and have virtually no performance hit."
"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."
"The product is really easy to use."
"It's really easy to build testing environments with VMware Player."
"The technical support is good."
 

Cons

"When using Cisco VXI in virtual environments there tends to be a lot of bugs with files you have to deploy across the virtual environment. You configure for hours, and then there is a bug that stops you, and you notice that you wasted hours."
"I think that performance could be improved by making it more effective and less resource consuming."
"The big issue that we've always had with VMware, was the disparity between what was presented for a Windows-based client and a Linux-based client. The Windows client was always two or three releases ahead of the Linux client. We always wanted VMware to change and improve the feature sets between the client connector on Linux and on Windows."
"The product's integration capabilities are an area with certain shortcomings where improvements are required."
"The GUI interface could be improved."
"They could include official support for macOS virtualization within VMware Workstation."
"To avoid problems you really do need to be on the most recent version, especially if you want to use W10 images."
"VMware Player isn't downgradable, so if you have a later set of VMs, you need to upgrade it or figure out a workaround."
"VMware Workstation has some network limitations which could improve, it is not as flexible as VMware NSX. Additionally, it could support operating systems better. I only run some Linux versions and Windows at the moment but it would be nice to be able to take whatever operating system you want and run it."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It is an expensive solution when there are bugs. I'm always ready to give money for a complete solution where there are no bugs in it, but you will never find it."
"VMware is expensive. Licensing can be tricky. For example, I recently had a client running VMware vSphere Essentials and wanted to migrate to a more scalable solution. However, they had no choice but to purchase a completely new license and deploy a completely new instance of VMware."
"The pricing is reasonable."
"The solution is moderately priced. I rate the pricing a six out of ten."
"It has the best licensing modules."
"The solution's pricing is almost the same as what Google Cloud, AWS, or Microsoft would charge you."
"With all its support and ease of use, VMware Player's pricing is fair."
"The product has a moderate price."
"VMware Workstation is an expensive solution in Asian countries."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Comms Service Provider
12%
University
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Computer Software Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business33
Midsize Enterprise14
Large Enterprise18
 

Questions from the Community

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Which VMware solution would you go with - Workstation or vSphere?
VM Workstation’s setup is so easy, you can use it almost instantly, it works well with Windows and Linux. We like VM Workstation primarily to test environments to determine how well a solution will...
What needs improvement with VMware Player?
Here's what happened with us regarding the prices for VMware Workstation: we purchased everything through Dell, and as is common, we got busy and didn't get everything activated. By the time we tri...
What is your primary use case for VMware Player?
I have a bunch of VMware servers set up, including our domain servers, our data servers, and some test machines on VMware. We're not really using VMware Workstation as workstations. We've got a cou...
 

Also Known As

VXI
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Advanced Medical Transport, Artoni Transporti, Calligaris, CIPCO, Citrix, Comcast, Desktone, Electricity Authority of Cyprus, Grupo Industrial Saltillo (GIS), LightEdge, Management Science Associates, Molina Healthcare, North West Redwater, Outscale
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Find out what your peers are saying about Citrix, Microsoft, Broadcom and others in Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI). Updated: September 2026.
914,109 professionals have used our research since 2012.