VMware Workstation Pro is virtualization software which allows running multiple x86-based operating systems on one PC. Users can run Windows, Linux and BSD virtual machines on a Windows or Linux desktop.
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Pricing
Hyper-V
VMware Workstation Pro
Editions & Modules
Developer
$24.95
per month
Bronze
$49.00
per month
Silver
$89.00
per month
Gold
$135.00
per month
Platinum
$199.00
per month
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Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Hyper-V
VMware Workstation Pro
Free Trial
No
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
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More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Hyper-V
VMware Workstation Pro
TrustRadius Insights
Hyper-V
VMware Workstation Pro
Highlights
Research Team Insight
Published
Hyper-V and VMware Workstation Pro are both server virtualization tools used to run guest operating systems on a single host machine. Hyper-V is a type-1 hypervisor designed to allow multiple virtual machines and is popular with mid-sized businesses that make use of other Microsoft technologies. In contrast, VMware Workstation Pro is a hypervisor that supports a wide variety of operating systems and is most popular with mid-sized businesses that aren’t heavily based on Microsoft technology.
Features
Hyper-V and VMware Workstation Pro can both be used to create and manage virtualized machines, but they also have some standout features that set them apart from each other.
In addition to being offered as a standalone tool, Hyper-V is built into Windows Server, making it easy to use and implement for network administrators that are familiar with Windows server. Additionally, strong support features are provided for Hyper-V through Windows Active Directory, so businesses won’t have to worry as much about the security of their virtualized workloads. Hyper-V also offers good performance, with virtual servers being quick to create and maintenance not resulting in down time in most cases. For businesses working with a primarily Windows environment, Hyper-V isw a strong choice.
VMware Workstation Pro supports a wide variety of operating systems, including macOS, Windows, and many Linux distributions. Additionally, VMware Workstation Pro can function well on many host operating systems in addition to having flexibility in creating guest operating systems. For businesses looking to create a large amount of virtual machines on a single host, VMware workstation allows for up to 512 guests, which is higher than many competitors. VMware Workstation Pro is a strong choice for businesses that need many guests per host, or who need to host MacOS virtual machines.
Limitations
Hyper-V and VMware Workstation are both competent tools for enterprise virtualization, but they also have some limitations that are important to consider.
Hyper-V allows for quick server creation and high security, but it doesn’t offer support for as many guest operating systems as competitors. For businesses that need to support more obscure Linux distributions or MacOS, VMware Workstation may be preferred. Hyper-V also only supports up to 384 virtual machines on a single host, so for businesses that need more it may not be an ideal choice.
VMware Workstation Pro offers support for many operating systems, but it can be trickier to learn compared to Hyper-V, which will be easy to use for administrators familiar with Windows servers. Additionally, while VMware Workstation Pro’s security features are respectable, they aren’t as powerful as the security features Hyper-V provides through Windows Active Directory.
Pricing
Hyper-V offers a free pricing package with limited features. This package is ideal for smaller businesses with smaller virtualization needs. Pricing for Hyper-V is dependent on organizational requirements but can stretch as high as $4,000 or more. The cost of Hyper-V can also increase based on what support the business needs.
VMware Workstation Pro is available as a standalone product for $249.99, though this license only includes 30 days of support. Additionally, the vSphere enterprise packages include VMware Workstation Pro along with other VMware software, licensing, and support. Licensing for the vSphere package starts at $995.00 and can reach as high as $5395.00. Support and software subscriptions start at $270.00 per year and can reach as high as $2769.00 per year.
Features
Hyper-V
VMware Workstation Pro
Server Virtualization
Comparison of Server Virtualization features of Product A and Product B
Because Hyper-V is a Microsoft product and based on Windows OS, creating virtual Windows servers and clients are easy. When we want to test our group policies it it best to do it on hyper-v environment then implement to production clients. The same goes with operating system quality and features updates as well as operating system upgrades.
Some scenarios where VMware Workstation pro is best suited are: 1. Utilization for testing software - can install a virtual machine to simulate software requirements and testing it on your network. 2. Testing operating systems upgrades and installation on specific hardware requirements. 3. Virtualizing a physical server 4. Being able to backup a whole server and restore from it in the event of any issue occurring.
Virtualization - Hyper-V does this well and I feel like it might be the best and easiest software out there to use. I am able to spin up virtual environments very quickly. Hyper-V also has a "quick" add feature where you don't even need to have the OS ISO on your computer and you can choose between Windows 10, Server or Ubuntu.
Setup and Management - Hyper-V is pretty straight forward. When I first started using this it seemed a bit confusing, but after a couple of days of playing with it you end up finding out everything is pretty straight forward and really not that complicated.
Just turn off the VM and go into the settings and you can manage the Storage, Memory, and CPU's.
Setting a VM up on a Domain is super easy and you can create a static mac address for the machine so in Windows DHCP you can use that static mac address to give that VM an IP it can use every time it boots up.
I think the best feature is the ability to create "Checkpoints" - If you are going to be doing something over and over and you need to start from the same point with each test you can setup your VM the way you need it prior to testing. Create a Checkpoint. Do your tests and then revert back to the Checkpoint so the system will be exactly how you had it setup prior to testing. Then you can go on and do your second set of tests and so on.
Another great thing is the ability to just backup the vhdx file.
As I mentioned at the beginning of this review we run most everything from Hyper-V. I make weekly backup of the vhdx files which are the Virtual Environment files.
This is an extreme example, but if the building ever caught on fire I could go out and buy like 15 PCs at Best Buy and load up Hyper-V on them and just import the vhdx files and be back up and running fairly quickly.
I would love to see Hyper-V add a better remote control feature. As it is, it uses RDP to connect to any VM in the host. This is old technology and slowly deprecating. It would be significantly more useful to have a controlled interface for remoting to the VM's that is much more like Teamviewer, LogMeIn, etc.
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.
Cheap and easy is the name of the game. It has great support, it doesn't require additional licenses, it works the same if it is a cluster or stand-alone, and all the servers can be centrally managed from a system center virtual machine manager server, even when located at remote sites.
It is very easy to configure new virtual machines and manage them. But you have to use different interfaces to perform various tasks. Especially as soon as it comes to clustering you have to use at least two different interfaces (Hyper-V Manager and Failover-Cluster Manager) to perform all necessary tasks. The newly released Windows Admin Center is a way into the right direction to get all management tasks into one single interface.
It is well documented since it is a long actor in the virtualization scene. Easy to use for most user cases. Pretty much not maintenance on the software besides the occasional software updates and/or compatibility issues from time to time.
In the past 2 years our Hyper-V servers have only had a handful of instances where the VM's on them were unreachable and the physical Hyper-V server had to be restarted. One time this was due to a RAM issue with the physical box and was resolved when we stopped using dynamic memory in Hyper-V. The other times were after updates were installed and the physical box was not restarted after the updates were installed.
Hyper-V itself works quickly and rarely gave performance issues but this can be more attributed to the physical server specifications that the actual Hyper-V software in my opinion as Hyper-V technically just utilizes config files such as xml, and a data drive file (VHD, VHDX, etc) to perform its' duties.
Most of the time, you can find support on the thousands of websites, blogs and community sites that are out there. Very much Internet supported, and if you don't stray too far away from the standard setup of Hyper-v, you shouldn't go wrong. I've had to call a couple of times, and Microsoft was very good at resolving my problem. it seem that Microsoft has heard from people and their support system, and are doing a much better job in this
I haven't had to call VMware Workstation support. The majority of the time, whenever I have a problem, I can perform an online search and find the answers I need. Online forums and users with similar situations are generally sufficient to answer any questions I have had, though, from previous experience at another company, their support is outstanding and responsive to circumstances. However, that is generally for a paid support contract and should be expected when you are paying for that support.
We had in person training from a third party and while it was very in depth it was at a beginner's level and by the time we received the training we had advanced past this level so it was monotonous and redundant at that point. It was good training though and would have provided a solid foundation for learning the rest of Hyper-V had I had it from the beginning.
The training was easy to read and find. There were good examples in the training and it is plentiful if you use third party resources also. It is not perfect as sometimes you may have a specific question and have to spend time learning or in the rare case you get an error you might have to research that error code which could have multiple causes.
initial configuration of hyper-v is intuitive to anyone familiar with windows and roles for basic items like single server deployments, storage and basic networking. the majority of the problems were with implementing advanced features like high availability and more complex networking. There is a lot of documentation on how to do it but it is not seamless, even to experienced virtualization professionals.
Considering the maturity of ESXi, Hyper-V is something I would definitely consider using in future jobs or organisations. We selected Hyper-V after many years of using ESXi; several factors led us to this change, including a poor support experience with VMware, and the lower cost of Hyper-V. We looked at other options including Nutanix and Hyper Converged Infrastructure, however with such a busy team we didn't have the time to learn this completely new technology stack, whereas (whilst also new) Hyper-V had a much easier learning curve.
VMware Workstation does have a price unlike VirtualBox, that is free. But, Workstation Pro makes up for it by how many features comes with it. We are also able to take VM's in our vSphere Production environment and spin it up on and isolated laptop for sandbox testing within Workstation Pro. I'm not sure that VirtualBox is able to do that
Nothing is perfect but Hyper-V does a great job of showing the necessary data to users to ensure that there is enough resources to perform essential functions. You can also select what fields show on the management console which is helpful for a quick glance. There are notifications that can be set up and if things go unnoticed and a Hyper-V server runs out of a resource it will safely and quickly shut down the VM's it needs to in order to ensure no Hardware failure or unnecessary data loss.
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.
