Likelihood to Recommend KVM is the best solution in the case you need to test and turn up any virtual environment with limited vCPU/RAM resources. The obvious area of its use is a network environment when we want to avoid being tied to one type of hardware/vendor and being able to swap from one instance to another with no downtimes. The use of a vSwitch (that supports VLAN tagging) is a significant bonus for network engineers that some other hypervisors do not provide.
Read full review VMware will work great for the following test scenarios:
Testing windows updates on a system Testing a new software or a new software version Creating a sandbox to test options/features of an OS Creating different VM to test a software on different OS without the need to have physical machines for all of them You can also use it as a "player" only where you have that static VM that you run from time to time as with my use for SAS University. Whenever you need to use the software, you simply start that VM.
Read full review Pros KVM is really good at providing fast and reliable virtualization for Linux guests Since KVM is a kernel module, every VM is a Linux process which can be managed by Linux system tools KVM integrates very well with the management framework libvirt, which is why KVM can be integrated in automation tools as well Read full review VMware Player is easy to use. VMware Player supports a wide variety operating systems. Unity mode makes it easy for the end user to utilize needed legacy applications while maintaining their familiar Host OS desktop. It's seamless to the point where the end user doesn't know they're running applications from a VM. Read full review Cons Complex networking GPU processing is not fully supported It's hard to set up without support tools Read full review Would be nice to use more VMs at once, but this is basically trial software, so it's hard to fault them. Read full review Likelihood to Renew I give a rating of 8 because VMware Player has its use cases, for example it requires the host OS to be logged in, and the VMware Player application to be opened and the Guest VM started. Only one VM can run at a time. I'd give a 9/10 to VMware Workstation because you can run shared VMs at startup without logging in or starting the workstation application. and i'd give ESX a 10/10 because ESX is the leader in enterprise visualization.
Read full review Usability Great product. Its user-friendly GUI and overall performance are really the biggest strength of this tool. The reason why I don't give a higher note is because of the price. Although it's decent (starting at around $200 for a license), there is a good free alternative in VirtualBox. Not everyone values friendly GUI as something worth paying for. For people that are more tech-savvy, I would recommend looking into VirtualBox as they might actually like the model better (with downloadable add-ons and packages).
Read full review Performance Integration isn't really relevant here but I see this question more as an OS compatibility for the VM. They state that they support over 200 different OS versions. I honestly have never tried anything else other than Ubuntu and Windows myself but nonetheless, this is impressive. I have not hit any limitation in my use of this software in terms of limitation or conflicts with other software.
Read full review Support Rating VMware support is very knowledgeable on their products, eveything from AirWatch to ESX clusters. VMware is easy to contact, they stay in touch and see the issue through to the end and a final resolution. They keep you up to date on your issue status and don't leave you waiting for answers.
Read full review Implementation Rating Installing the application was easily completed on the twenty computers that needed VMware Player. Once those 20 users were configured we copied our virtual machine template to the 20 users and turned on their newly provisioned virtual machines. We then configured unity mode so the user could easily work from within the virtual machine from their host desktop.
Read full review Alternatives Considered Kernel-based Virtual Machine is an open-source and free solution, compared to Virtualbox which is a product from Oracle.
Read full review Both free, VMware supports USB 3.0 while VirtualBox does not. VMware supports nested hardware-assisted virtualization while VirtualBox does not.
Read full review Return on Investment KVM just works and gets out of the way KVM is working great with other open-source technologies like QEMU and libvirt Read full review A positive impact is that it require little to no funding to use. Negative impact is that because it is free it can be hard to get support. Read full review ScreenShots