VMWare Comparison – Player vs Workstation

I use VMWare Workstation. To address your concerns:

• I find that the console is more responsive than the VMWare Server console, so that's a plus. I will switch between remote desktop and direct console and don't notice much of a difference in responsiveness.
• Sound performance is great. I've never had disconnects like you describe.
• I understand VMWare Workstation 7 has multi-monitor support, though I have no experience with it.
• VMWare Workstation does group all of the machines together in one Window, so they have to be managed as tabs and not as separate windows.

VMWare Workstation does have some additional drawbacks over VMWare Server.

• In particular, there's no automatic suspend support. If you accidentally log off or shutdown the host computer, all of you guests will be instantly powered off. They claim there's no reliable way to shut them down without running them as a service, and they can't run them as a service for security reasons. In other words, "it's complicated".
• There's no good remote administration support. You can execute command-line scripts, or you can remote desktop into the host, or you can use VNC (if you've enabled it for a given machine), but there's no web interface to administer workstation.

Some of the reasons I run Workstation over Server.

• Some of you reasons mentioned.
• Better hardware support.
• I feel better supporting the project financially, as it's the best product out there and the price is reasonable.
• Great snapshot support. Multiple live snapshots, live VM cloning, shared disk space.
• It doesn't run that dreadful Tomcat stuff with all of the bugs that come with trying to get it to work well under Windows.
• I feel like VMWare Workstation makes much better use of my resources.

Other reasons for keeping VMWare over other VM products.

• Memory over-allocation. You can run a 2GB virtual machine on a host with 2GB of memory. I don't recommend it in general, but in a pinch, it's a nice feature.
• Great hardware support - connect high-speed USB devices and many other things. I've always found VMWare ahead of the curve with machine virtualization technology. I've rarely seen a feature of another product that VMWare didn't already do well.

This all looks normal to me.

Anything under 10.0.0.0/8 (and also 172.16.0.0/12) are perfectly normal NAT addresses. When you put your VMs in NAT mode, the software is essentially acting as it's own dhcp server for the guest machines and will do translations to the host network, so that all the guests on a particular host share an IP with the host. Anything in any of those ranges are fair game for NAT. It appears that VMWare uses a 192.168.0.0/24 range by default, and VirtualBox uses a 10.0.0.0 range. Both are just fine, and neither is better than the other (though I personally prefer 10.0.0.0 ranges because there are 255 times more addresses available).

It sounds like maybe you expected NAT mode to use the NAT between your host network and the internet, but that just doesn't happen. In fact, that is what bridge mode does. Switching to bridged mode means your VM guests are now connected directly to your home router's dhcp server for addresses. VirtualBox and VMWare will both now get addresses from the same place. VMware will have changed as well, it's just that the old mode and the new mode were assigning addresses from similar pools.