Could upgrading to Workstation 12 Pro become problematic (for me)?

[eskimo682]

(boring license stuff first, a few real questions last, consider everything WIN only, so rarely use Linux anymore)

Background: Owned a Workstation license since day 1 or so and usually kept it upgraded at intervals (even for home use) simply because like I like to own a license (and love(d) vmware).

Mostly skipped WIN8 at home so haven't upgraded since 2013 (Workstation 9.x). Apparently there is no "half price" upgrade 9->12. Wow. Could settle for Player 12 and home use and consider some xmas offer later I guess.

Running Player instead of Pro would have me a bit worried though. The old Player had pretty much nothing as far as to creating virtual machines and fiddling with the options (apart from going straight to the .wmx file). Guess I could use Workstation 9.x to create and Player 12.x to run.

1) If I now upgrade to Player 12, is there some hardware compability like before (like 4.x..., 6.x..., 9.x)? And if so, if I use that, am I screwed if I have to roll back to Workstation 9? Backing up like 12 virtual machines and eventually going back after several months does not sound like a good option. 12, yeah, I like to separate dubious activities like development environments, gambling, ancient games, wife's shoddy web visits, kid gaming (multiply by several computers).

2) Similarly, upgrading vmware tools (if it still exists) in a vm, would it be backwards compatible  12->9?

3) Upgraded one vm from WIN7 to WIN10 and having huge problems. Looks like EDGE does all graphics using CPU under vmware, not GPU. Yupp, 100% far too often and any graphics load slows things to a crawl (read casino slots ). Would upgrading to 12.x likely improve anything? Would I need Pro to alloc video memory to the vm or something (saw a comment like that in Player vs Pro - would feel insane to have a limitation like that though)?

4) Had the common copy/paste problems after installing WIN10 into a vm. Really, this ancient problem STILL exists? cant copy/paste from guest to host

Sorry about the long rant. Just not sure I want to spent 250e for the joy of owning my license anymore (too used to <100e upgrades every two years I guess).

[eskimo682]

Maybe I ended up writing in the wrong area.

Will spend time doing my own tests and conclusions.

Sorry no sale.

[huxiang · Accepted solution]

Hello,

Welcome to Workstation Community!

I'm sorry that I cannot help on the license problems. Let me answer your questions about the product:

1) Sure. Player 12 can work with VMs of old Hardware version as well as the old Player does.

2) I'm not sure about it. But you can uninstall the latest tools with Player 12 and then install the old tools back.

3) Yes. Win10 guest is not officially supported by Workstation 9, so any problem is possible in this configuration. Win10 host and Win10 guest are officially supported since Workstation 12, we did a lot of work to improve the user experience. You can download a Trial version of Workstation 12 and have a try.

4) I can only say the copy/paste function should work with win10 guest in Workstation 12 (if you installed the latest VMware Tools), and according to our tests, it works well with files, folders, plain text, formatted text...

Hope it helps,

Regards,

Shawn

[eskimo682]

Things work better with Player 12 but there are still issues like intermittent sound choking or graphics bottlenecks. But I can live with it as it's not something mission critical.

As for licensing, maybe there is some offer some day that will have me return as a paying customer. Not giving up on VMware yet :smileygrin: .