VMware Workstation Reviews

We use VMware Workstation for mostly legacy operating systems.

VMware Workstation allows multiple operating systems in the same physical machine.

VMware Workstation’s scalability could be improved.

I have been using VMware Workstation for 15 years.

I rate VMware Workstation ten out of ten for stability.

I rate VMware Workstation a five out of ten for scalability.

VMware Workstation's initial setup is easy.

VMware Workstation can be deployed in less than half an hour. We implemented the solution through an in-house team.

I would recommend VMware Workstation to other users.

Overall, I rate VMware Workstation a nine out of ten.

We work on issues for the banking and education sectors. As well as for virtual workstations.

The simplicity of the deployment and the implementation, and the footprint for the hardware are some of the solution's valuable features.

The support can be improved.

I have been working with VMware Workstation for 35 years. 

It is not a very stable solution. I rate the stability a six out of ten. 

It is a scalable solution. I rate the scalability a seven out of ten. 

It should be easy to reach out to them. There should be a stable service engineer that will connect to the process and then to the solution.

Neutral

The initial setup is easy. I have programed it on-premises. The deployment can take hours. I rate the initial setup an eight out of ten.

I programed the solution myself.

The solution is moderately priced. I rate the pricing a six out of ten. 

I recommend using the solution. I rate the overall solution a seven out of ten. 

Create multiple Virtual machines for various needs by different team members and also for other teams. Some of them are for crash and burn and some for extended validation.

The most valuable features of the VMware solutions (ESXi and vCenter) are snapshots, backup, restore, virtual networks, over provisioning of storage (in thin provisioning) etc.

The price of VMware solutions could improve.

I have been using VMware Workstation for approximately seven years.

VMware Workstation is a stable solution when compared to all the other hypervisors in the market. Snapshots, rollback and forth etc works smoothly. However, I do not have extended experience with the other solutions

The scalability of the VMware Workstation is good. We are able to add multiple ESXi servers into the vCenter and scale the requirements according to the client's needs. It can scale very well.

I have not had direct interaction with the support. However, I have heard it is good.

I have used hypervisors from various vendors and I prefer vmware over other productss. 

The initial setup of the VMware Workstation is easy.

VMware Workstation has a high price than competitors in the market.

My advice to others is they should be clear on the requirement for the hypervisor. Why are they going for VMware or any other hypervisor solutions and what are the benefits that they can bring to the table for them. They should choose the best vendor in the market, not only in terms of the vendor but in terms of cost. VMware is slightly on the higher side when it comes to price, but for all the interface customers, it's a one-stop solution for all the virtualization needs.

I rate VMware Workstation an eight out of ten.

I have not found a solution that is above an eight out of ten in my experience. There is room for improvement. VMware Workstation is now into microservices, containers, Kubernetes, and others containerization technology which I have not had a lot of experience with.

This product is solid and useful for quick test/dev environments. 

Found replicating client application upgrades and compatibility tests within a virtual environment makes upgrades very successful. 

We also use it for custom application testing to ensure compatibility and smooth transitions.  

Since I work with so many different customers, I deal with many operating systems and workstation configurations. When performing upgrades to servers, applications, windows, etc., I need to know the ramifications before we go live with production.  

Creating labs has been useful for my employees when working on certifications.

I am also not a big fan of adding and removing software over and over on my laptop, so I use my VM's when I need a temporary application installed. It also keeps the clutter down, keeping my main tools fast and efficient.  

They also come in handy when cleaning infected thumb drives.

I have found this product excellent for test/dev environments. This is 90% of what I use this product for. 

I have had issues with the virtual network adapters in the past that has taken some time to troubleshoot. 

I have encountered stability issues with the virtual networks and have had run into issue with copying or moving VMs. Usually these all work great 9 out of 10 times, but when it doesn't work right it become very time consuming to fix and troubleshoot.

None thus far.

8 out of 10. Good SR system to communicate through emails and phone support.

No

Setup is very easy.

Using workstation saves money on big hardware using vSphere just for test/dev.

The pricing is a bit steep in my opinion for testing and there are other options.  None however that are so powerful and easy to use.

No

VMware Workstation is a desktop product I use for personal testing on my laptop. If I want to spin up a virtual machine on my laptop, I use VMware Workstation.

VMware Workstation allows you to run a virtual machine.

For some virtual machine configurations, you have to go to the text editor and make the configuration changes, which could be improved.

I have been using VMware Workstation for ten years.

VMware Workstation is a stable solution.

Around 30 to 40 engineers use VMware Workstation in our organization.

The solution's initial setup is straightforward and can be done by the users. You run the setup profile, and it will guide you through the installation.

VMware Workstation helps engineers and developers test their applications on their laptops.

VMware Workstation is an expensive solution in Asian countries. Users have to pay a licensing fee for VMware Workstation.

I would recommend VMware Workstation to other users.

Overall, I rate VMware Workstation an eight out of ten.

VMware Workstation is used by almost everyone who is trying to test something on their laptop.

I'm using it for my personal use, for testing. If I want to know how things are working, then I will test it using Workstation.

The features are good. 

There's not much to deploying a VM, or virtual machine. It's all pretty easy.

They could bring in many different features from VMware vSphere to Workstation. This is a free version they are providing. However, it could be more robust. Therefore, if they could bring in things from the enterprise versions to the Workstation, that would be very helpful.

I've been using the solution for at least five or six years now. 

We are using a free version of the solution. 

I'm not sure which version of the solution I'm on at the moment. It's likely the latest. I'm at around version 14.

I'd rate the product seven out of ten. I've been pretty happy with its capabilities overall. That said, it could be more robust and offer more features. 

We use the solution as a hypervisor to deploy VM workloads for testing.

The solution's most valuable feature is the ease of use compared to other vendors.

The solution's pricing could be better.

We have been using the solution for more than ten years.

It is quite a stable solution.

It is a scalable solution.

The solution's customer service is good.

We need to download the EXE file for the solution and install it. It takes five minutes to complete the process. However, time might vary depending on connectivity, operating system installations, etc.

The solution has perpetual and subscription-based licensing models. They are pretty expensive.

I recommend the solution to others and rate it as a ten.

The ability to drag a VM to an additional monitor and utilize VMs on separate windows, drag and drop. I like the newer network editor. Using a wireless guest network to keep my network separate from activities like downloading software and the like, this keeps the bandwidth for my users at an optimum level while allowing me to download an ISO image from MS or some other large file. I used to have to wait until after hours to perform bandwidth hogging work. But now, I can leverage our wireless guest network to accomplish these tasks and minimize late hours.

The ability to run Virtual machines in different networks and with different security levels. I can sandbox my windows machine when I need to use a non domain admin account for daily tasks but have another sandboxed machine to handle system admin tasks. I also have a wireless sand boxed Ubuntu machine that is in no way connected to our internal network for testing our websites, outside email etc. This has saved me a great deal of time and effort.

Performance is a needed improvement. I would like to see a faster response on my VMs. Linux support is so-so - many of the VM Tools you need are different packages downloadable from the distro you are using. Ubuntu 15.x seems to have improved the ability that plagued the product - getting the host share folder to be accessible from a Linux VM.

Pricing. When you purchase VMware workstation you get a great product but there is a cost. It is more expensive than Fusion or Player.

I have used VMware workstation 10 and now 12 - I skipped 11. It is an expensive upgrade too. With the versions listed above, I have been running this for several years.

Deploying using a LINUX OS - (especially CENTOS 7) seems to strip some functionality and is fraught with difficulties. Save yourself some headaches - deploy it in a Windows environment and then use Linux as a VM.

I have had a few issues prior to update1 - but I am unsure if this is due to my platform or if it is a VMware related issue. I also noticed that it uses a lot of RAM when running multiple instances of Windows VMs. Update - I have 32GB RAM now and it works flawlessly. I have been working in this newer environment for several months and I couldn't be more pleased.

On Windows 7 - I can run 2 VMs (I have a beefy Workstation with 2 quad core Xeon procs and two NVIDIA Quadro Cards as well as 16 GB RAM) It does not play well when there are more than 2 windows VMs running on top of a Windows host environment. Update - I have a new machine with an i7 6700 processor - it is more than adequate to run the base Windows 8.1 OS, another Windows 8.1 OS a Windows 7 OS, and an Ubuntu 16.04 OS simultaneously. I do this on a daily basis at work and the performance is great. I use a SSD for the base Windows OS and the other OS's live on a larger 3 TB drive that I use for virtual machine/server work.

I think support is an issue for VMware - they only offer support for this product once you purchase more than 10 licenses. This is a show-stopper for smaller organizations like us. We would like to pay for support the same way we do for the Vsphere licenses and have the ability to upgrade the product under support without an additional charge. This is really a big deal for us.

Not much there for technical support.

I have used Virtual box and Hyper-V. VMware workstation is more powerful than either of these. You can create virtual networks to test things on, you can emulate an entire network with outside, inside, DMZ, servers, clients, (use GNS3 to create a virtual firewall) then test things prior to rollouts. You can also connect to Vcenter or to esxi hosts. You can upload servers and change settings, you can even add HDD's from your SAN to a VM from VMworkstation when that VM is powered off

Pretty simple - the network editor is the one you have to pay attention to if you are trying to setup multiple networks. The defaults really do not unleash the power of the platform.

In house

It paid for itself multiple times. Especially when we had to pull in older Windows 2003 servers for disk manipulation. I also use this when vCenter is unavailable to manipulate machine settings.

Spendy - be prepared to buy multiple Windows OS's and to spend a couple hundred or more on the Workstation software. Look for a VMware sale if possible. I also use this at home to run my Ubuntu within Windows.

Yes, virtual box and Hyper-v (comes with Windows 8 and 10 professional for free so you really don't need to buy Hyper-V) VMware is far more powerful than either of the free ones. No Network editor, the ability to copy and paste on the fly etc. is limited on the freebies. See my comments below about network editor.

Use this to secure your Domain admin accounts - don't setup email, surf the web, or do anything outside of your internal network using your DA account. This product can help you immensely. Using the virtual network editor can also be a benefit to you in this regard you can setup a virtual machine using wireless on a totally different network, use the vm (I use Ubuntu) to perform web tasks like testing your web site externally or to download and scan for malware prior to letting it on your production network.