In the next table, we can check all the features and differences between Workstation Player and Workstation Pro. As we can notice, most of the advanced features are only available in Workstation Pro. Decide on which application to use for your virtualization work, it all depends on what type of work and Virtual Machines you want to create and its purpose.
Depending on those needs, select the best tool that fits your requirements. Business and non-profit use is considered commercial use and the other requires a commercial license. As we showed in this article, Workstation Player is more for basic virtualization tasks, and Workstation Pro is more for advanced and expert virtualization work with some more powerful features.
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If you continue to use this site, you consent to our use of cookies and privacy policy. Shut down the VM, then go to the directory where your VMs are stored and copy the directory with all VM files to this location or to another location. Rename the opened VM clone to avoid confusing. If the virtual disks of your VM are located in different directories, it may be not convenient to clone the VM manually.
If you need to export a VM to an OVF template , you should manually download and install Open Virtualization Format Tool ovftool , which is a utility with the command line interface. VM clones require additional disk space; synchronizing clones between machines is also a drawback. Rational usage of resources is the advantage of VM sharing. You can manage remote VMs in a similar fashion to how you manage VMs running on your host machine on which VMware Workstation is installed.
Moreover, with the Virtual Network Editor, you can create multiple networks and configure them as needed. Each bridged network can be bridged with different physical network adapters.
There is no Virtual Network Editor. As for bridged networking, you can select a physical network adapter to be bridged in the VM settings after selecting the Bridged network by pressing the Configure Adapters button. VMware Workstation Pro has a built-in access control feature that can be used for VM encryption and restrictions. Enabling encryption prevents unauthorized VM access such as reading data from VM virtual disks, reading and editing VM configuration files, etc.
After entering the encryption password, a VM becomes available. Enabling restrictions protects a VM against changing VM configuration and allows you to set the expiration date for a VM after which date, a VM will not start.
A VM must be encrypted before enabling restrictions. The encryption password and restrictions password may be different. From that point, you can edit VM settings and start the VM. VMware Player cannot edit encryption and restriction settings — you cannot encrypt a VM, and you cannot disable encryption set in VMware Workstation Pro.
See the section about licensing below to read more details. This feature is called raw device mapping RDM and can be used when a VM needs to have a direct access to a physical disk of the host machine, for example, when a physical disk contains a lot of data, and you do not wish to create a new virtual disk for copying all that data. This particular mapped disk is called the RDM disk. When talking about VMware Workstation Pro vs Player in the context of nested virtualization, it is necessary to mention that both solutions support nested virtualization and can run a VM inside another VM.
This option allows you to avoid entering a login and password manually after loading the operating system on a VM. Text, images and other specified information used by applications can be copied from a guest OS and pasted into the host OS and vice versa. Seamless desktop integration Unity mode.
Windows in the guest applications can be displayed among windows of the applications in the host operating system, much as you would run guest OS applications in the host OS. VMware Workstation Pro generally has more features and provides more options that result in a more detailed GUI with a higher number of menus and buttons. You can manually close VM tabs even if a VM is running.
On the screenshot below, you can also see a VM that is in a suspended state on pause. When a VM is suspended, the preview of the VM interface is saved on a screenshot at the moment when you sent a command to suspend the VM.
In the left pane of the VMware Workstation Pro window, the VMs you have opened are listed, and their status stopped, running, suspended is displayed. This pane is called a VM library. You can click the VM name in the list to open this VM in the tab. At the top of the window, you can see a menu bar and the VM state change button. In the right bottom corner of the VMware Workstation Pro window, the virtual devices indicators are located in the status bar see the screenshot above.
The indicator is active when a virtual hard disk is active. If there are two virtual hard disks, then two HDD indicators are displayed, and so on. This rule is true for other devices displayed in the indicators panel of the status bar. You can click the indicator icon and edit the device settings. The indicator of a virtual network adapter of a VM is blinking similarly to how the LED near the Ethernet port of the physical network adapter would when the adapter is connected to the network and data is sent and received.
You can connect to a virtual printer, if virtual printers are enabled in Preferences. Sound device. The audio card of the host machine can be used for audio input and output in the VM. USB device 1. Message log. You can read the message log for the current VM. If some devices are disconnected from a VM, if some features are disabled, or warnings are displayed — you can find this information in the message log.
The graphical user interface of VMware Player is much simpler. The list of used VMs is displayed in the left pane of the window and VM tabs are missing.
Read more about VMware Horizon in this blog post. Indicators that resemble the indicators of VMware Workstation Pro are located in the top right corner note that you should expand the indicators panel.
You can add this path to the PATH environment variable to make it possible to execute vmrun from any directory. Try reinstalling the program to fix this problem see the screenshot below. It is recommended that you install both bit and bit packages on bit Windows. Warning : Perform all the following actions including actions with system files at your own risk. Improper manipulations with system files can harm your system. In order to fix this error, edit the vixwrapper-config.
The default file view in our case is shown on the screenshot below. Change 19 to 20 and Rename the Workstation Now try to use vmrun for VMware Player. In our case, vmrun is now working correctly and we have used the command line interface to start the VM in VMware Player. Now you can add a directory where vmrun.
