What are the limitations of Vmware Player for Personal Use vs. Pro

The main difference is that VMWare Player can run, but not create virtual Machines. Workstation can do both.

Update: It appears versions > 3.0 now include the capability to create Virtual Machines, but as stated by hawkdsh, it still lacks some of the advanced features such as snapshots.

You may also want to check out VMWare Server which is also free.

More information on all of them here.

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.