VMWare Player vs VMWare Workstation [closed]

Question

Can anyone give me a simple comparison of those two? It is hard to get the idea from their web site.

Answer 1

VM Player runs a virtual instance, but can't create the vm. [Edit: Now it can.] Workstation allows for the creation and administration of virtual machines. If you have a second machine, you can create the vm on one and run it with the player the other machine. I bought Workstation and I use it setup testing vms that the player runs. Hope this explains it for you.

Edit: According to the FAQ:

VMware Workstation is much more advanced and comes with powerful features including snapshots, cloning, remote connections to vSphere, sharing VMs, advanced Virtual Machines settings and much more. Workstation is designed to be used by technical professionals such as developers, quality assurance engineers, systems engineers, IT administrators, technical support representatives, trainers, etc.

Answer 2

VMWare Player can be seen as a free, closed-source competitor to Virtualbox.

Initially VMWare Player (up to version 2.5) was intended to operate on fixed virtual operating systems (e.g. play back pre-created virtual disks).

Many advanced features such as vsphere are probably not required by most users, and VMWare Player will provide the same core technologies and 3D acceleration as the ESX Workstation solution.

From my experience VMWare Player 5 is faster than Virtualbox 4.2 RC3 and has better SMP performance. Both are great however, each with its own unique advantages. Both are somewhat lacking in 2D rendering performance.

See the official FAQ, and a feature comparison table.