VMWare Workstation 15 upgrade from 14, is it worth it?

[Richey_S]

I purchased VMWare Workstation Pro 14 in March 2018 and in under 1 year I'm receiving emails offering an upgrade to version 15, with a reduction in cost making it around £100 currently.  Looking at the features included in version 15 is this expense worth it, my feeling is no.  Especially as reading though the various additions I would have expected them to be included in updates and enhancements to 14.  Does this therefore mean that the product is not good value for money?  

[wila · Accepted solution]

Hi,

There is no information in your post that can help us answering your question...

The "if it is worth your money" question is highly subjective to how you are using the product.

Maybe this helps:

- VMware Workstation 14 is maintained for 2 years, you get updates and security patches. It will generally not however always support newer host operating systems. So if you run your install on for example a Linux and you want to upgrade to a newer version of that Linux distribution you might be on your own. This tends to be less of an issue on a Windows host.

- You can use upgrade discounts for 2 versions (at least that is how it was in the past), so version 14 will also allow you to upgrade to version 16 at a discount once it is released.

- New versions of the product tend to be released around August/October each year.

--

Wil

[sjesse]

I in general wait till the upgrade where the version I'm on is the last one to be supported, I just went from 12 to 15 and there really wasn't much of a difference to me in those versions other than supported guests.

[DodgeDeBoulet]

If you're on 14 and everything works satisfactorily, no.

I had an opportunity to purchase an upgrade to 15 at a very good discount and took advantage of it. Fortunately, I did not actually perform the upgrade, as I subsequently found out that display scaling is now crippled for Windows guests. Had I known about this issue with v15, I wouldn't have spent the money no matter how good the deal was.

With an update to v14 they broke my Logitech mouse's functionality so I no longer have access to the forward/back buttons in the VMs.

VMware is going backwards. If the scaling issue isn't fixed, I'll be switching to something else before I spend any more money on upgrades.