I use a mixture of VMware Workstation on Linux and KVM both at home and at work.

One PRO for VMware Workstation is the existing library of VMs which serve various purposes.  Regenerating or rebuilding them all over again, as well as protecting the infrastructure of unique/local configurations would be too painful and simply not an efficient use of time.
-  I've not experienced the cruft left behind from uninstalling VMware Workstation, as you'd mentioned; maybe that was a significantly older version?
-  The issue of it breaking every 2-3 kernel updates is a little vague; though this might simply be the outdatedness of an older instance of VMware Tools in the VM.  Simply keeping VMware Workstation up to date, and periodically ensuring your VM's get updated (consistent with the version of VMware Workstation) and that their internal VMware Tools also get updated will likely reduce the frequency of this problem, again, assuming it is kernel version to VMware Tools version related.

One PRO for KVM is its command-line ability to instantiate a VM from scratch, even to the point of giving it the right configuration, 'booting' it up, and it goes to the kickstart server to automatically build itself (of course the kickstart server has to have the wherewithal already established).  I'm disappointed that VMware has failed to include this staple in their PIX tools.



From: ProPAAS DBA <dba@propaas.com>
To: Community support for Fedora users <users@lists.fedoraproject.org>
Sent: Tuesday, January 17, 2017 11:01 AM
Subject: VMware Workstation vs KVM

Hi All;


I'm running Fedora 25 on a laptop with 16GB of ram. I'm frustrated with
the VMware workstation reliably breaking every 2 to 3 kernel updates and
sometimes with no reasonable fix in sight for some time. Not the end of
the world and I get the reasons behind it, however I wonder if KVM might
be a better plan. I used KVM many years ago and it was not quite as
reliable & easy to work with as I needed.  I assume it's gotten better?

Questions:

- does anyone have experiences good and bad with KVM? Any gotcha's or
common issues I should be aware of?

- Anyone have experience with both KVM and VMware? opinions on which is
better, more stable, etc?

- Is is easy / possible to convert a VMware workstation VM to a KVM?

- With VMware I get the vmnet network and I don't have to do anything
other than select nat, bridged, etc to get networking in place for a VM,
even if I want to access te VM directly from another machine (i.e. not
the local only network). Is this true with KVM as well?

- If I decide later to remove it does it remove cleanly? I dislike the
vmnet & other bits VMware leaves around even after an uninstall


Thanks in advance..


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