Alternative to VMWare??

[Ian Branch 121]

Hi Team,

With the recent change in ownership of VMWare and the changes that have been wrought to it, I am leary of continuing to use it.

What is a suitable alternative?

I am using Win 11.

[Brian Evans 83]

Which product? I used to use VMWare Workstation Pro.  I now use Hyper-V, WSL and Windows Sandbox on a system running Windows 11 Pro. Which of the three depends on the task. 

[Ian Branch 121]

Tks Brian.

Yes, VMWare Workstation Pro.

What dictates which alternative you use?

Ian

[JonRobertson 39]

I would suspect it depends on your usage and needs. I used to configure and manage VMs for a dev/QA test environment, initially using VirtualPC and later migrating to Hyper-V.

 

Today I do not use VMs as often as I used to. I use Parallels Desktop on my MacBook Pro and VirtualBox on my other laptops.

[Ian Branch 121]

Ahhh.  Tks.

[Vincent Parrett 657]

On windows I just use hyper-v - on my macbook pro I use parallels - on my servers proxmox - no need for vmware at all.

[Tom F 80]

I'm hoping to use Virtual Box in place of VMWare Workstation Pro for development and testing.  I'm hoping its snapshot feature has similar functionality to VMWare's. (And, hey, it's free, AFAIK!)

But, to be honest, I don't know much about it yet and I haven't gone much further yet than thinking about it.

 

Here's evidence that VMWare is dying.  https://communities.vmware.com/t5/VMware-Workstation-Pro/High-CPU-usage-by-vmnat-exe-after-upgrade-to-VMware-Workstation/td-p/2992063 

Edited March 8 by Tom F

[JonRobertson 39]

2 hours ago, Tom F said:

I'm hoping its snapshot feature has similar functionality to VMWare's

VirtualBox User Manual - Snapshots

[David Schwartz 415]

VirtualBox FTW! I've been using it for several years now (since 2017 or so) and have had very few problems with it. I run it on my Mac and do Delphi work inside of it on Win10. 

[Brian Evans 83]

14 hours ago, Ian Branch said:

Tks Brian.

Yes, VMWare Workstation Pro.

What dictates which alternative you use?

Ian

Main Windows application development: Windows 11 Pro host, Linux development and use: WSL, quick look at Windows installers/software: Windows Sandbox and the rest on Hyper-V virtual machines. 

 

WSL is well integrated with Windows - can run Linux graphical applications and access files across Linux/Windows (\\wsl$\<distro_name>   and /mnt/<drive letter> depending on which direction you want to go).