Due to the absolute nightmare that Workstation Pro has been, I am now and forever saying goodbye to it after decades of being an exclusive VMware user.
There are two main, and persistent problems that never seem to be adequately addressed:
- Absolutely horrible performance on Windows 11. There are, or were times when it worked fast, but suddenly, for no reason, it all slows down to a painful crawl. I've experienced this buggy behavior on and off, over the years. What makes it all the more maddening is that VMware offers no explanations as to why this intermittently occurs, and their "solutions" are either less than desirable half efforts, or simply never fix the problem.
- Bizarre guest behavior. From time to time, guest OSes appear to behave strangely, buggy, as if somehow corrupted. I've bumped into this sort of behavior also, on and off over the years.
I've moved everything over to Hyper-V which BTW is freely available on Windows 11, and what an outstanding improvement it is! VMs not only load lightening fast, they remain fast and stable. I supported Hyper-V over the years but really never considered it for the Desktop, after all, most of my Engineering support is directed around VMware EXSi, so naturally, VMware Workstation/Player was always the only professional consideration.
Broadcom might want to re-evaluate (perhaps dear I say, reinvent) their dev teams -- it has truly become a **bleep** product.
It has become so unbearable to use, that I've been forced to uninstall it. Fortunately, FUSION on my Mac system works great, so I'll just have to use that for local VMware testing (Windows dev team, LEARN from Mac dev team!)
I'll monitor this thread for comments from Boradcom engineers (assuming they're brave enough not to bury or delete this post), in hopes that they reply about the coming fixes to these troublesome issues in a future releases. Otherwise, replies indicating that the problem is me, my system or unique or rare will go wholeheartedly ignored.
