VMWare Player vs. VMWare Workstation

Question

Can someone give me a simple comparison of the two? It's hard to get an idea from your website.

Answer 1

VM Player starts a virtual instance , but cannot create vm. [Edit: Now it can.] A workstation allows you to create and administer virtual machines. If you have a second machine, you can create a vm on one and start it with a player on the other machine. I bought a workstation, and I use its vms test setup, which the player launches. Hope this explains this for you.

Edit: according to FAQ :

VMware Workstation is much more advanced and equipped with powerful features, including snapshots, cloning, remote connections to vSphere, sharing virtual machines, advanced settings for virtual machines and much more. The workstation is intended for use by technical specialists such as developers, quality assurance engineers, system engineers, IT administrators, technical support representatives, trainers, etc.

Answer 2

VMWare Player can be seen as a free, closed source competitor Virtualbox .

Initially, VMWare Player (up to version 2.5) was intended to work with fixed virtual operating systems (for example, to play back pre-created virtual disks).

Most users may not need many advanced features , such as vsphere , and VMWare Player will provide the same core technologies and 3D acceleration as the ESX workstation.

From my experience, VMWare Player 5 is faster than Virtualbox 4.2 RC3 and has better SMP performance. Both are great, but each has its own unique advantages. Both of them do not have sufficient 2D rendering performance.

See the official FAQ and feature comparison chart .

Answer 3

There are some functions on the workstation that the player lacks, for example, teams (groups of virtual machines connected by parts of the local network) and multilevel snapshot trees. It targets experienced users and developers; they even have some hooks for using the debugger on the host to debug the code in the virtual machine (including things at the kernel level). However, the core technology is the same.

Answer 4

from http://www.vmware.com/products/player/faqs.html :

How to compare VMware Player with VMware Workstation? VMware Player allows you to quickly and easily create and run virtual machines. However, VMware Player does not have many powerful features, remote connections to vSphere, drag and drop to vSphere, several Snapshots and Clones, and much more.

Impossible to return pictures, it does not matter to me.

Answer 5

One of the main reasons that we worked with a workstation through a player in my work is that we need to run virtual machines that use a physical disk as their hard disk instead of a virtual disk. The workstation supports the use of physical disks, while the player does not work.

Answer 6

re: VMware Workstation support for physical disks and virtual disks.

I run Player with VM Disk files on my own dedicated fast hard drive, regardless of the OS hard drive. This allows both the OS and the player to independently read / write to their disks, the difference in performance is noticeable, and the second WD Black or Raptor or SSD is cheap. Placing a VM disk file on a second disk also works with Microsoft Virtual PC.