Hi inhabitants of the internet! I was looking at updating VMware to a paid version but prices are kind high so I'm thinking a lot about it. I just need to run one machine at the time and I don't see any other feature that may lead me to buy it. Does anyone that uses VMware paid can make me a brief rundown of the features it has compared to the free version? Also if there are an suggestion for a better virtualizing environment on Windows (I already tried VB and it's not my thing, unstable and laks all that integration that I have with VMware between host and VM) feel free to suggest me. Thanks.
VMware paid what?
Are you talking about workstation?
If all you need is 1 workstation, you can VMware player. It's free. You'll have to create your VMs in something else.
ESXi is free and you don't need vSphere if you are only managing 1 VM.
I use ESXi at work, and Virtual Box at home. Both are adequate. Virtual Box is just fine for most peoples use.
3 Likes
I know, I've been a bit vague really. I've seen on VMware site the Pro version but also the Player Pro version, so to not make the title too long I just named them paid versions. Also what're the real difference between vSphere vs Player?
vSphere is the management system for ESX(i) servers. You only need vSphere if you are managing a lot of VMs or want to do advanced shit. Enterprise shit.
I didn't see a "Player Pro". I think you are talking about VMware Workstation.
I wouldn't waste any time on VMware. Just use Virtual Box.
1 Like
I'm talking about this VMware version but I just realized that I'm dumb and that's a business license.
Well I have eight VMs actually and some are servers (Windows Server 2012 R2s and generic Linux ones based off of Fedora Server) so do you think vSphere would be helpful somehow?
With VMware I have a seamless copy and paste function between Windows VMs, I can do unity mode and see windows from my VM onto the host machine and generally VMware has been really stable. Can VB do all of that? If the answer is yes I'll give it a shot again.
VirtualBox seamless mode:
I'd try out VirtualBox. It's free. If you don't like it you can [acquire] VMware Workstation.
2 Likes
I've used VB before, but didn't really got the hang of it and had some issues. Thanks for all the suggestions and replies.
VirtualBox is pretty good these days.
Good luck.
1 Like
I think you are thinking of vCenter...
1 Like
fuggg
I'm getting rusty.
If you need it for a company, then buy a license. For personal use, there isn't much point to it.
Hi,
Not sure if you have found the answers you were looking for but here's a couple of things think about;
VM Ware Workstation Player is free for personal use, but is severely feature limited; you cannot create snapshots or create linked clones which are imemnsely useful for labs. It also restricts you to running a single VM at a time (I think).
Virtual Box has these features, but IMO lacks elsewhere - it's support for OpenGL and Direct X is nowhere near as good, so it really depends on what you want to.
If you are running Windows 8.1 or 10 Pro you have Hyper-V built in. This is the best hyper-visor if all you want to do is run Windows in a VM, for Linux it is only good for headless servers, the desktop experience is poor - sound is disabled and trying to get a resolution higher than 1024x768 can be a challenge.
On Hyper-V in Windows 10 I've been able to play (older) games on the VM via RDP, which is quite impressive for a virtalised GPU.
You said you use a Windows Server 2012 VM; one thing I have done in the past is to use VMware Player to run a single Server 2012 R2 VM, and then enable pass-thru of CPU virtualisation intruction sets. I was then able to build out labs with several VM's using Hyper-V inside the VMware VM.
Crazy? Maybe, but it works, and works well. The nested VM's get full CPU performance and Hyper-V under Server 2012 R2 is pretty good and it supports dynamic resource allocation for the guest VM's, linked clones and virtual networks etc.
1 Like
As mentioned above, VirtualBox is very good lately. If you have any problems with it, post on the forums and we'd be happy to help you.
The way I see it, there's no reason to use VMWare for home or enterprise use. Home use has virtualbox and proxmox. Enterprise use has libvirt and OpenStack.
1 Like
Thanks a lot for the extensive reply. Regarding what you said in this line
I've only had issues running Android x86 and Remix OS above 1024x768, all the other Linux distros had the UI working pretty well and scaling accordingly even upping the resolution above my monitor one.
I agree regarding Hyper-V. About the snapshot thing I have to do manual backups every week or so since VMware Player does not support snapshots, as you said.
No 10+ core CPU here to do such a thing but that's a proof that MS Hyper-V is as good as I thought.
That sounds good, maybe MS have updated their modules in the newer kernels to improve support? They did recently say they would start treating Linux as a first class citizen in Hyper-V and Azure and its been a while since I've virtualised any recent Linux distros in Hyper-V.
You don't need lots of cores to be able to run multiple VM's at once. I get pretty good performance with several running on an i5, but each VM isn't doing much and I can choose to use Hyper-V's resource controls if I do need VM's to do some work but not clash with each other too much. Haviing plenty of RAM and SSD's is usually the secret to well performing VM's unless you really are running software that thrashes CPU usage.
Just looking at Hyper-V on a post anniversary update of Win 10 Pro looks like they have made some tweaks. Something new to go and explore...
1 Like