Workstation: great for home use and development
February 05, 2019
Workstation: great for home use and development
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with VMware Workstation
For at home development of virtual machines, it is hard to find a better solution. VMware Workstation is primarily used as personal Linux and web development solutions. It is a super simple/flexible product that allows individual users very robust options. We use it for developing exploit capable boxes and ranges allowing staff to work from home while remaining productive without having to have a cloud solution from home. Currently, roughly 70% of our organization is using VMware workstation in some form or another, whether it's on BYOD, or assigned org devices.
- VMware Workstation is very easy to use and learn. Little to no knowledge of virtual computing is needed to operate Workstation.
- The price point is not that bad. While there are free solutions out there that provide simple and basic virtualization solutions, VMware Workstation is definitely worth the money. Also, they offer educational discounts.
- While being easy to use it has advanced options, it can integrate into remote clouds as well.
- The snapshots offered on Workstation is a great feature many of the free virtual tools do not have. This allows you to save a live state or dead state of a machine. Allowing immediate rollback or roll forward to points you've saved.
- Making it easy to export VMS is something that Workstation struggles with; exporting to OVA which is the primary type of VM we export to is cumbersome and can be difficult without proper knowledge on how to do this.
- Management of VMS could be a little bit more in depth.
- I think the networking portion of Workstation could use some slight improvements, more in-depth segmentation to support containers, however, this is a small issue and not something many people will miss or need.
- It has allowed others and myself to work from home on projects intended for production use.
- It has greatly improved productivity and time to production.
- Development on personal Workstations and from home (which is what we use this for) has assisted our organization in managing home/work life balance.
- It has definitely has a positive impact on our organization.
While I'm not very familiar with other offerings, I think Workstation is a tier one solution. It's top of the line. While there are free options out there, none are as robust and easy to use as VMware offering. I don't believe you can find a solution that does the same thing as Workstation for the price. While Windows does have a virtualization solution, it's nowhere near as easy to use and not as mainstream.