We performed a comparison between VMware vSphere and VMware Workstation based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: VMware Workstation has a slight edge in this comparison due to it being the less expensive solution.
"Has many good features, and is stable and reliable."
"It is a very mature solution that is easy to use and flexible."
"It helps us with TCO."
"The solution's flexibility allows us to implement it widely."
"It is very easy to use and very stable."
"We've found the High Availability and flexibility to be important."
"Ease of support is one of the main features that we have with it. We're able to take Snapshots before doing updates to make it easy to roll back if something does happen to go wrong."
"The solution is easy to use, has high performance, and good virtualization."
"We can undo some changes using the snapshot feature."
"The solution's customer service is good."
"It is much more mature compared to Nutanix or SimpliVity when it's cross-platform based."
"The most valuable features of VMware Workstation are the DirectX support, you can run Microsoft Hyper-V in virtual environments which is good for me to test different installations. Additionally, you can set up different VLANs, and overall it is a complete solution."
"The most valuable features of VMware Workstation are the speed of access and quality of upgrade. Those are the more important and pertinent aspects as far as we were concerned. Functionality and features were relevant for the customers. What a customer chose, we had to make sure that it operated."
"VMware Workstation is great for migrating and patching operating systems."
"Great at solving connection problems."
"We are able to simultaneously run multiple operating systems in a single machine and have virtually no performance hit."
"VMware vSphere is perfect for the on-premise solution, but we are in the cloud era, so I think maybe VMware needs to invest more in the cloud and the microservice chain. It would be better if VMware offered more cloud solutions and continuous applications."
"We've been using vSphere on Windows 7, and it had less fluff associated with ThinApp. Currently, with Windows 10 version that we have, it adds a lot of bulk to ThinApp. We have offices spanning across Canada from the east coast to the west coast. A ThinApp that is roughly around 400 MB in size would take minutes to open up. With Windows 7, the same ThinApp used to be close to 75 to 80 MB in size. So, I'm really not happy with the extra fluff that is bundled in Windows 10. It really messes things up for us at times."
"There are some limitations with the solution regarding migrating."
"An improvement could be allowing a "dark mode" for the interface. I think the HTML5 client is a little bit hard to read. It's all white. It's a little bit bright on the eyes. A lot of us IT guys view in the dark."
"I think the pricing could be lower, and the technical support could be improved."
"Archiving, exporting, and backing up need to be improved for this solution, because they're slower than expected."
"I would like having something that works on a smaller screen, so we can get to it on our iPads and have it more touch-centric versus having to sit at a laptop."
"There needs to be more integration overall. That would be quite helpful."
"For some virtual machine configurations, you have to go to the text editor and make the configuration changes, which could be improved."
"The product's integration capabilities are an area with certain shortcomings where improvements are required."
"It takes too much time to load all the plug-ins and software."
"I have had issues with the virtual network adapters in the past that has taken some time to troubleshoot."
"It would be great if VMware Workstation had more networking options and compatibility, that would be great. I would like to deploy virtual switches and play around with networking a bit more. Otherwise, I have to deploy ESXi Virtual Edition and emulate it, which is painful and clunky."
"The price should be reduced."
"The GUI interface could be improved."
"The price of VMware Workstation could improve."
VMware vSphere is ranked 2nd in Server Virtualization Software with 446 reviews while VMware Workstation is ranked 2nd in Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) with 42 reviews. VMware vSphere is rated 8.8, while VMware Workstation is rated 8.8. The top reviewer of VMware vSphere writes "Offers good performance and is useful for banking systems". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VMware Workstation writes "An easy-to-manage solution that has really good customer support compared to other market players". VMware vSphere is most compared with Hyper-V, Proxmox VE, Oracle VM, KVM and Nutanix AHV Virtualization, whereas VMware Workstation is most compared with Hyper-V, KVM, VMware Fusion, Proxmox VE and Oracle VM VirtualBox.
We monitor all Server Virtualization Software reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
This question is like what do you prefer?
Wordpad or Word?
Both are useful, just for different things. So one would probably end up using both.
Would you it-central-stationeers stop with this nonsense already?
if it is for business or enterprise-class virtualization, vSphere solution is the way to go.
Workstation is used for lab.
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 work before we put it into production. VM Workstation can also give us an idea of the issues we can anticipate and how best to address them. This solution is also great at creating labs for our team when working on certifications.
VM Workstation can be a bit clunky, though. There is a lot of resource consumption and the overall performance could be a bit more effective. Visio stencil for technical documentation would be a nice improvement. This solution is relatively expensive..
VMware vSphere is very good from a recoverability point of view; everything can be stored much easier on a virtual server than a physical one. VMware vSphere is very good with memory sharing between VMs and CPU scheduling between VMs. The command-line tools integrate well with Microsoft products, so it’s easy to manipulate them. VMware vSphere is very stable and very scalable.
The initial setup with VMware vSphere can be a bit complex. You need to have a good understanding of VMware. This solution does not permit hard partitioning. We found there were occasional bugs and errors and that the HTML5 is not up to par. The pricing and licensing options can get expensive.
Conclusion:
The two solutions are both VMware and perform amazingly. They are dependable and very reliable.
VM vSphere is a hypervisor and is created for large-scale production. VM Workstation is best as a test environment, although many choose to use VM Workstation in front of VM vSphere and migrate test projects, results, and data documentation to VM vSphere.
Both are VMWare products.
simply v-sphere is a hypervisor Tier-1 technology stack
VMWare workstation is a desktop release installed on windows or Linux OS
if your requirement is limited need few VMs for testing purpose you can go for Workstation.
but if you need production VMs you need a separate independent hardware server for v-sphere esxi hypervisor.