VMware Workstation Player 12 (Formerly known as Player Pro) runs on standard x86 based hardware with 64 bit Intel and AMD processors and on 64 bit Windows 300 MB of available disk space for the VMware Workstation Pro 12 application. Additional hard disk space required for each virtual machine.

Advertisement If you’ve never used one before, virtual machines can be overwhelming. Not that they’re difficult to use, but they’re unlike any other kind of app and that unfamiliarity is what scares most off. In practice, Virtual machines allow you to run other operating systems on your current computer. Here's what you should know about them.

And extremely useful. The toughest hurdle to getting started is deciding which virtual machine software to use. Several options exist, but if you don’t want to pay a cent, then only two are worth discussing: VirtualBox and VMware Workstation Player.

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In this post, we’ll compare both of them and help you decide which one you should use. For this comparison, we’ll be looking at VirtualBox 5.1.26. Price While VirtualBox and VMware are both free, they aren’t equally free. The core engine that drives VirtualBox is licensed under GPLv2 and Many assume 'open source' and 'free software' mean the same thing but that's not true. It's in your best interest to know what the differences are., but the “extension pack” is under Oracle’s proprietary license and is only free for personal use, educational use, or evaluation purposes. VMware Workstation Player is the free version of, meant strictly for students, non-profit organizations, and personal or home use.

The catch is that you have to sign up for the occasional VMware promotional email. Commercial use requires the Pro version. (VMWare also offers the VMWare Fusion version 11 is here. Here's why it's a great update for anyone who needs to run a virtual machine on their Mac.). For casual home users who just want to The term 'virtual' has been co-opted in so many ways. Virtual reality.

Virtual schools. But Virtualization in the context of PCs can be confusing. We're here to clear it up. Or, they’re both free so you have nothing to worry about. Ease of Use To compare, I installed Elementary OS 0.4.1 in both virtual machines, then ran both of them (not at the same time) and used them as I would any normal machine. VirtualBox has a wizard that walks you through the creation of a new virtual machine. It makes recommendations for how much RAM and hard drive space to set aside based on your system’s hardware.

Launching a virtual machine is as easy as clicking Start, and again it walks you along every step of the way. I was up and running within minutes. Learn more in. VMware Workstation Player’s setup wizard is even easier, allowing you to tweak aspects that can only be done in VirtualBox after the fact (e.g. How many CPU cores to dedicate). Unlike VirtualBox, VMware doesn’t recommend values so first timers may feel unsure how to proceed.

VMware’s interface is simpler and less intimidating. Learn more in We’ve lavished attention on VirtualBox here at MakeUseOf, and for good reason. However, VirtualBox isn’t your only option for creating and using free virtual machines. VMware Player, VMware’s free product, is every bit as good. Performance VirtualBox is among the slowest virtual machine solutions currently available. It was never very fast to begin with, but ever since it was acquired by Oracle in 2010, performance has slowly but surely degraded.

To be fair, if you’re going to run a virtual machine, you should be doing it on a powerful computer because You've probably heard of emulation before, but do you know what emulation actually means or how it works? And if your computer is powerful enough, you won’t notice the relative slowness of VirtualBox. It’s not terrible — it just isn’t as fast as it could be., on the other hand, has excellent performance. When running the same guest operating system in both virtual machines with the same amount of resources allocated, I find that VMware is without question faster and more responsive.

If you have to run virtualization on a mediocre system, or if you plan on spending a lot of time in a virtual machine every day, then VMware is clearly superior. But if your system is top-of-the-line, you can go with either one. Compatibility and Reliability One of the more interesting uses for a virtual machine is the ability to Virtualization allows one operating system (OS) to run on another OS. We'll show you how to create a virtual machine clone of your system and how to use it. And virtualize it on another computer.

Programmers, for example, can clone their Linux development environment, virtualize it on a Windows computer, and keep working. In order to do that, the virtual machines need to be compatible with both systems. This is one area where VirtualBox surpasses VMware.