NVIDIA Virtual PC (vPC) vs. VMware Workstation Player

Nvidia GRID is the only real ready-made hardware solution available for streaming game services, 3D graphics acceleration in Virtual Desktop Infrastructures, and 3D enhanced streaming apps. Grid is also great for processing large quantities of small data-sets, such as financial, trading, science, astronomy, and much more. Grid is also well known for digital currency mining, such as Bitcoin.

Incentivized

VMware will work great for the following test scenarios:

• Testing windows updates on a system
• Testing a new software or a new software version
• Creating a sandbox to test options/features of an OS
• Creating different VM to test a software on different OS without the need to have physical machines for all of them

You can also use it as a "player" only where you have that static VM that you run from time to time as with my use for SAS University. Whenever you need to use the software, you simply start that VM.

Incentivized

• Streaming Game Services.
• Dedicated graphics processing form virtual desktop infrastructures, allowing the use of Photoshop, CAD, Video Editing, and more.
• Enhanced computing & processing of data thay consists of large amounts of smaller data sets.
• Financial based calculations.

Incentivized

• VMware Player is easy to use.
• VMware Player supports a wide variety operating systems.
• Unity mode makes it easy for the end user to utilize needed legacy applications while maintaining their familiar Host OS desktop. It's seamless to the point where the end user doesn't know they're running applications from a VM.

Incentivized

• The cost for Nvidia GRID capable hardware is still very high, but is & has been dropping fairly rapidly.
• Latency is a large problem for "interaction" based systems (Gaming, remote desktop use) and requires high-speed data, and hosting close to the client.
• No real solutions for smaller businesses, but cloud hosting providers like SoftLayer are beginning to offer affordable hosted grid-capable environments.

Incentivized

• Would be nice to use more VMs at once, but this is basically trial software, so it's hard to fault them.

Incentivized

I give a rating of 8 because VMware Player has its use cases, for example it requires the host OS to be logged in, and the VMware Player application to be opened and the Guest VM started. Only one VM can run at a time. I'd give a 9/10 to VMware Workstation because you can run shared VMs at startup without logging in or starting the workstation application. and i'd give ESX a 10/10 because ESX is the leader in enterprise visualization.

Incentivized

Great product. Its user-friendly GUI and overall performance are really the biggest strength of this tool. The reason why I don't give a higher note is because of the price. Although it's decent (starting at around $200 for a license), there is a good free alternative in VirtualBox. Not everyone values friendly GUI as something worth paying for. For people that are more tech-savvy, I would recommend looking into VirtualBox as they might actually like the model better (with downloadable add-ons and packages).

Incentivized

Integration isn't really relevant here but I see this question more as an OS compatibility for the VM. They state that they support over 200 different OS versions. I honestly have never tried anything else other than Ubuntu and Windows myself but nonetheless, this is impressive. I have not hit any limitation in my use of this software in terms of limitation or conflicts with other software.

Incentivized

VMware support is very knowledgeable on their products, eveything from AirWatch to ESX clusters. VMware is easy to contact, they stay in touch and see the issue through to the end and a final resolution. They keep you up to date on your issue status and don't leave you waiting for answers.

Incentivized

Installing the application was easily completed on the twenty computers that needed VMware Player. Once those 20 users were configured we copied our virtual machine template to the 20 users and turned on their newly provisioned virtual machines. We then configured unity mode so the user could easily work from within the virtual machine from their host desktop.

Incentivized

Nvidia invented the graphics processor, and continues to provide high quality products, even in a new industry

Incentivized

Both free, VMware supports USB 3.0 while VirtualBox does not. VMware supports nested hardware-assisted virtualization while VirtualBox does not.

Incentivized

• Allows us to simplify all of our VDI designs, as power users can be managed like all other cloud users, instead of requiring individual systems.
• Provides a way of offering a substantial processing increase for computing/calculations over and above what additional CPUs could offers.
• Offers the only "ready-made" solution for on-demand gaming services, after Sony purchased OnLive, and provides an affordable method for startups to enter the Industry.

Incentivized

• A positive impact is that it require little to no funding to use.
• Negative impact is that because it is free it can be hard to get support.