VMware Workstation is a great compliment to your VMware environment.
October 24, 2019
VMware Workstation is a great compliment to your VMware environment.

Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with VMware Workstation
VMware Workstation is being used by a few departments to do a variety of things. It is being used by some to access VMs on our host clusters, it is being used by others to create and run local sandbox VMs, and we have used it to copy deprecated VMs to an end-users desktop giving them the opportunity to start that VM and do data recovery on into the future. Workstation provides a good alternative to a remote desktop for managing your servers if they are all virtual. It also provides a great way to do testing and one-off application usage on your desktop in a sandbox.
- It provides a great remote access tool for accessing and managing servers in virtual environment. With the security risks surround remote desktop this provides a good alternative to do the same functions.
- The app itself is very lightweight and easy to install/maintain.
- Sandbox testing can be a time consuming thing to setup and do. Workstation makes this easy to create, use, and put away. This make you more willing to put new things in the sandbox and test them before production usage.
- The cost of workstation is very affordable for the functionality that you get and you can try it for free before you buy it.
- We use it to run apps that can be difficult to setup or conflict with other apps. We just spin this app VM up run it, and then shut it back down. The startup and shutdown is very quick.
- It's not free? With all the money spent on a VMware environment, they could easily give this product away as a tool to use with the overarching products.
- Initial licensing can be a bit of a challenge as with any VMware product.
- We have never needed support as the product is very easy to use, but VMware as a company doesn't provide the greatest support.
- As you read the three things above, you will notice that we really don't have any ideas on how to improve the product as it works very well over all.
- The ROI on Workstation would be hard for us to compute. It makes things easier to do and to get access to, but there are other applications and methods to do much the same thing.
- Where there has to be a some form of ROI is in the fact that you will actually do things that you might not otherwise do simply because Workstation makes them easier. Sandbox testing is a good example of this idea.
We didn't compare Workstation to other alternatives and we haven't used any other products like it. I guess you could use Workstation in conjunction with ESX and without vCenter, but I'm not sure and we have always had vCenter. We chose Workstations because it was a known tool that works well in large VMware ecosystem that already had and because it was inexpensive and easy to use.
Do you think VMware Workstation Pro delivers good value for the price?
Yes
Are you happy with VMware Workstation Pro's feature set?
Yes
Did VMware Workstation Pro live up to sales and marketing promises?
Yes
Did implementation of VMware Workstation Pro go as expected?
Yes
Would you buy VMware Workstation Pro again?
Yes