VMWare Workstation Complexity

[kasper]

Workstation is free for Microsoft, Linux and Apple.   This is rather astounding.  On top of that, we have Intel, AMD, and ARM at the top of the hardware food chain.   It is no wonder that many issues will arise given all the complexity.   I am grateful that Broadcom is giving away a great piece of software for free.   At the end of the day HyperV and other solutions are far less palatible.

[RaSystemlord]

I appreciate that you are revoking discussions here - that's one of the great things that Forums can offer.

Like you say, good job. People haven't really realized this - when it is Free, you can Download it "from everywhere". You don't need a site id or Broadcom verification or anything. Also the concept of "discontinue software" isn't familiar to everybody - it means, that sooner or later, there is NO such software that works with new systems. There is no reason have a minimalistic version, Player, because the real deal, Pro version, is for Free.

Yes, the complexity is certainly a matter for a software company trying to provide virtualization. It still makes me wonder ... if we forget the Windows 11 thingies, with are just patches trying to overcome the severe design errors of Windows itself, just to put this short. If they are trying to make everything else to fail, than Windows own virtualization, it wouldn't be little wonder. Of course, absolutely NO partner can talk bad about Microsoft - they would be kicked out from the entire Windows infrastructure. So, we as consumers, can just observe how things are crazy.

One would think that Linux would then be free of all this hassle. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. Certainly no TPM-chips or VBS's are needed there.

However, and that is a big however, I gave up Linux for VMware in 2021 and went to the devil's camp. The reason was that there were 3 main no-go's with Linux and VMware ... after using it 15 years with absolutely no issues. And Linux was a far better platform for VMware - Windows was really bad, at times during those years. In 2022 I moved to Win 10 with Ryzen and with Laptop - zero problems with VMware (or with anything with Asus ROG Strix hardware).

I don't know, if those things have been corrected? Based on comments here, they might have been. Let me know, if these work now.

1. Shutting down Windows 10.
This was the problem for many. No response from VMware at that time.
I understood that Restart is NOT the same as Shutdown-PowerOff-Start sequence, but it is much better, and that could have failed because of new Windows "inventions" (in reality patches over patches over patches). But now we were talking about Shutdown.
In the end, sooner or later, this problem destroyed the VM computer, because you had to Power it off, kill processes and sometimes power off the Host without a proper, clean, quick Shutdown of guest OS. No uptodate backup could even theoretically exist, because you create the Backup after a Shutdown, which did not work.

2. NTFS not working for VMs.
For Win interoperatibility you needed external NTFS disks that you could use between Win laptop and Linux workstation. But Linux could not load VM from NTFS disk. 
Copying from NTFS worked like normally with Linux. So, you could create the copy of the VM to ext4 and use it like this. But it wasn't professional interoperability that I had got used to work with the last 15 years.

3. System freezing
That might have been hardware related. I even changed the cooling to the better, but that didn't help any. I only afterwards got a tip that lowering the CPU voltage, might help on the old system that I had.

Anyway, there were and are complicated matters behind the scenes.

[RaSystemlord]

No takers on an actual discussion, huh?

As for complexity, I did two different things:

1.

Let Win 10 Pro to Upgrade to Win 11 23H2 on a Asus ROG workstation. I let VMware Pro be at 17.5.0.

I tested with guests: Some Kubuntu, Win7, Win S 2016, Win 10, Win 11.

No problems.

2.
I took VMware 17.5.2 according to one Google suggestion, from archive.com. It is Free, you know. I selected Linux version for a test.

I let my Kubuntu computer Upgrade from 22.04 to 24.04. I installed 17.5.2 VMware there.

I tested some guests: Win11 perhaps the First Official Version of it, Puppu Linux, Mint 20, Win7, some Ubuntu.

Observations:

• no problems getting VMware downloaded. It is Free and available "everywhere".
• performance with Kubuntu guests wasn't great, because I ran VMs from a HDD, on 2nd gen I7 (about 15 years old Asus workstation). In reality, NEVER run VMs from a HDD, but they still worked in my tests (which isn't a suprise as such)
• Puppy Linux was lightning fast once opened, but that is how Puppy just is when running from a disk
• installing that VMware version on Linux, is not working straight-away. That is no News as such with Linux & VMware. The solution came with Google, and there under Broadcom.com, so in this very Forum. To carry out requires some basic understanding beyond Windows. Some might call it complexity, but in reality many windows-concepts are much more confusing.

[goldeneye_007]

I have run an office full of VMware Workstation Pro for Linux for many many years. We run Windows in VM's which

is the reverse of what many people seem to be attempting and having so many issues with.

In our configuration I have not seen any of the issues you describe.

There has never been any need to run special drives for NTFS volumes. I don't know what you are on about there.

I have never run VMware Workstation on Windows maybe that is the issue with NTFS drives. I don't really see the point of running anything

of importance on an unreliable OS. Using VMware on Windows is asking for trouble in my opinion.

I would use Linux and put your unreliable OS in a VM so you can roll back when it inevitably fails.

[RaSystemlord]

goldeneye_007: I agree on your sentiments, since for anything important in VMware, I used Linux from (about 2005-2019). Zero problems and Windows was horrible in many ways.
In 2021 I came back to virtualization on Linux and found out these problems that I described. I was in VMware Forum for about half a year and got no wiser about these problems. Many had them and the failure to Shutdown Win 10 was the deal breaker. VMware did not comment in any way. Then, in 2022 I moved to Windows 10 laptop, for several reasons, and there everything runs OK. I'm NOT in a corporate Domain and in the good old days, I did NOT let the corporate ICT-department touch my computers ... that is why they worked quite well.

As for NTFS - For technical tasks, I used a Linux workstation. Laptops, which I needed for obvious portability and demos, were always Windows OS's. In those days, some corporations had paid no attention to linuxes ... even if their Android/Apple where already Linux/Unix, which should have told them something. From there comes the need for NTFS, because I wouldn't even have dreamt that ext4 works reliably on Windows. I mean, I was using some of those VMs alternatively on Linux or Windows from an external USB-disk.

Anyway, it doesn't really matter for me, because I just tested with 15-year workstation, latest Kubuntu LTS and all virtual computers worked fine there (with version 17.5.2) ... no NTFS anywhere and I wouldn't like to try it anymore.