Well, for one they removed the best feature of VMware workstation, the shared virtual machines. But also they also (silently) increased the requirements of various bits of the program, leading to a ton of workarounds needed to get the 3D working and alike. In short a massive downgrade, done middle way in the 16.x lifecycle, contrary to any common sense and to what they promised 16.1.2 Product Support Notices Deprecation of the Shared virtual machine feature The Shared virtual machine feature (VMware Workstation as server) is being deprecated. It will remain in its present form for the remainder of the VMware Workstation 16 product life. This feature will be not available in a future release. 5 months later.... 16.2.0 Product Support Notices The shared virtual machine feature is no longer supported from Workstation 16.2.0 Pro.
Okay. Thank you for the detailed response. I never new what this share feature was and how I could leverage it to improve my workflow. Could you please shed someling on the usecases of this share feature ? Also, from your post, they elevated the requirements for other guest programs, could you please elaborate on this with some examples ? Your help will be greatly appreciated.
I was from the cellphone when I replied earlier, so I was concise. But to elaborate a bit more. With shared VMs you can actually have VMs that can start automatically no matter if you log in, you can connect to a remote (or local) machine using another WMware instance, using the VMware remote console or some versions of VMware player. When you do that (unlike a normal RDP connection) you remote also the 3D and multimedia capabilities With Hyper-V + RemoteFX you could do the same but, MS did an even worse move removing it FORCEFULLY from all supported systems. In short 2020/2021 wasn't a good timeframe for virtualization. For the record VMware 17.something introduced the VM autostart feature, which is a really bad replacement for the Shared VMs. You need to log in to get it working, then you can connect using RDP, which means no 3D, no multimedia capabilities, no way to use the remote console and so on...
Well it's a feature that impacts bot who do serious things (having a server that runs in background or alike) and also who use a vm for gaming / multimedia. Obviously if use the vm to run say winNT4 or win3.11 for fun, is not a problem
VMware was sold (by Dell) to the hideous Broadcom, few months ago (the first move was to remove the permanent licenses, and to kick in the ass the VMware resellers. The second one was to fire 2900 people. Now Broadcom has spun off the desktop products (they care of the big money coming from VMware ESX and alike, they dont giva a crap about few bucks SW like Workstation, Player & C) So I guess it's normal that after two owners changes in few months there is a "little" confusion.