VMware Workstation: Do you use it? What do you think of it?

[aceO07]

I've been using VMware Player for a while and used to use VMware Server when it didn't need a separate client.

I use it for work/personal software dev/testing. Manually backing up and restoring VMs have been time consuming later and tedious lately.

Those who have VMware Workstation, what do you think of it? Was it worth the money? I'll be using it under Win7 pro.

 

[jobz]

VMware Workstation has the snapshot function, which allows you to take one or more snapshots or images of your virtual machine, and which you can go back at any time, say after testing some new software. Is this what you are looking for?

 

[Nothinman]

Look at the feature list, if you need things like drag/drop file copy, multiple snapshots per VM, etc then go for it. Otherwise stick to Server.

 

[aceO07]

Yup, snapshots is one thing I'm interested in. I'm familiar with that since VMware server used to be look like vmware workstation and offered limited features from it.

I haven't use the new version of vmware server since they had apache server and made you use a client. Think it was v2.0. Wasn't a fan of their change and it didn't seem to work that well for me. I've used VMware player since.

I do know of their major features, just really curious if they worked properly and was of value and maybe how they are used.

 

[Neverm1nd]

I use VirtualBox for VM's. It's pretty good, and free.

 

[yinan]

Workstation is awesome and I have been using VMware's family of products for well over 10 years now. One of the nice things about workstation is the ability to pass USB devices through from the host to the guest.

Can't comment on the cost I got it free as a hookup from our VMware Technical Rep

 

[Nothinman]

Workstation is awesome and I have been using VMware's family of products for well over 10 years now. One of the nice things about workstation is the ability to pass USB devices through from the host to the guest.

Can't comment on the cost I got it free as a hookup from our VMware Technical Rep

VMware Server does USB too, but might just be 1.1, does Workstation do 2.0? I had some licenses for VMware Workstation back from the 2.0-4.0 days but haven't had a compelling reason to upgrade since Server does all that I need.

 

[Thor86]

I've been using VMware Player for a while and used to use VMware Server when it didn't need a separate client.

I use it for work/personal software dev/testing. Manually backing up and restoring VMs have been time consuming later and tedious lately.

Those who have VMware Workstation, what do you think of it? Was it worth the money? I'll be using it under Win7 pro.

VMWare workstation and ESX (now vSphere) are the only products that offers "multiple" snapshot management per VM. VMWare Server, even Hyper-V doesn't offer this feature. Of course with more snapshots, more physical disk space is utilized, but this is something I cannot live with especially in testing software, and updates with my VMs.

However, they borked something in v7, as now the VMs desktops inputs are sluggish over an RDP session only. Locally it works fine. This is something v6.5.x didn't exihibit. Hopefully they come out with a revision soon.

 

[yinan]

Workstation does do USB 2.0. I keep an iTunes VM so that I can easily sync my phone, regardless of whether or not I have switched computers

As for another reason to use workstation is the teams feature. It basically creates isolated virtual switches so if you want to play around with multiple networks you can, and also have them isolated from each other.