VM Interoperability between ESXi 5.1 and VMWorkstation 10

[kevbod]

Guys, can anyone point me to a document or give me some advice in this area.

One other thing is I have both Workstation 8 and 10, will that throw more spanners in the works, i.e. is v10 far superior in this area than v8?

Some context

I have an ESXi 5.1 server (AMD Turon, 8MB) that i use for large test beds but it is obviously not easily portable. Have seen some performance degradation with large numbers of VMs but is solid on all 32 and 64 bit installs.

On my new 64 bit laptop (Intel Core i5-2450M @ 2.5Ghz, 8MB) I have Workstation 10 installed and can run all 64 bit OS installs if installed locally. If working away I do some eval work on this but it will performance degrade quite quickly when using external apps e.g. browser and usually a reboot sorts it out. As such i tend to do simple stuff on this while working away e.g. ArcSight logger rule configuration on a single VM server.

I understand they are different operating systems and I guess the disk file formats are incompatible. A transfer of a critical VM that i did loads of work on the ESXi based VM fails to run on the laptop after taking ages to download it from my server. AAAArrrrgggghhhh!

[continuum]

> , i.e. is v10 far superior in this area than v8?

Hi - what makes you think that a higher version number means a superior product ???

In my experience ( I am a hardcore WS user since version 2 ) Workstation reached its alltime peak with 6.5.4 and after that every new version was a disappointment.

My first experience with WS 10 makes me think that they reached the lowest point with WS 9.
For me WS 10 is definetely better than WS 9 - anyway I would recommend WS 10 in its current state only for WS 9 users - if you are a satisfied with WS 8 I'd rather wait until 10.01 before considering to change.

Just my 2 cents

Ulli

[kevbod]

Ulli, I couldnt agree more with the idea of letting software bed in before installing it and thanks for the reply.

I was forced to go to v10 due to numerous VMtools install and other issues with version 8 - many of my product vendor evals are time critical and the clocks were all over the place on the VMs without tools installed. Vendor evals also tend to use latest and greatest Operating System versions and I would recommend anyone who has had similar problems to me to upgrade to v10. VMware are obviously addressing such problems in the latest version but not the legacy versions - I would not expect them to do otherwise!

Perhaps I should better explain my comment of " is v10 far superior in this area than v8?". My context here is simply how can I get best interoperability of VMs between ESXi and VMware Workstation and.does v10 deliver something that v8 doesnt?

I am sure I am making a pretty basic error here due to lack of understanding of how the products work. For instance, do I need to export the VM built on ESXi in some special generic format and then import it into the Workstation product  (or vice versa)? Will I run into VMware Tools issues across the two platforms? Other issues?

Finally, I can thoroughly recommend version 8 to anyone doing simple VM stuff around known legacy OS s. Its only with the later eval stuff on Unix that I found small but significant problems and have encountered little or no issues with Win2k8 or Win 7 and below.

[continuum]

> My context here is simply how can I get best interoperability of VMs between ESXi and VMware Workstation and.does v10 deliver something that v8 doesnt?

Thats more a matter of your personal skills and knowhow than it is a matter of the version.
Up to ESXi 5.5 and WS 10 Workstation could basically run all VMs that were created on ESXi without the need of any conversion. With ESXi 5.5 that may change due to the new vmdk specs  - but I hope that WS will be able to handle the new format sooner or later.