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Dell Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) Services vs VMware Workstation comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Nov 5, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Dell Virtual Desktop Infras...
Ranking in Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI)
15th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
2.2
Number of Reviews
3
Ranking in other categories
Hosted Virtual Desktop Services (1st)
VMware Workstation
Ranking in Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI)
3rd
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
5.7
Number of Reviews
57
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) category, the mindshare of Dell Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) Services is 1.1%, up from 0.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Workstation is 9.5%, down from 15.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
VMware Workstation9.5%
Dell Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) Services1.1%
Other89.4%
Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI)
 

Featured Reviews

SA
IT Lead at a outsourcing company with 51-200 employees
Centralized virtual desktops have boosted secure client access and daily productivity
Dell Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) Services is hosted centrally in data centers where I log in to the virtual desktop interface to work on client applications. I get access to all client applications on a daily basis, including application permissions and working access, all related to client applications with the help of a VPN network. Dell Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) Services has had a huge impact on getting connected to a customer's application. It provides seamless access to the client's network, and with the help of a VPN, I connect to the client system and take a remote session to work on daily tasks. It has increased productivity significantly, and Dell Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) Services is stable and scalable. It has been able to grow with our needs.
GC
Director of IT at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees
Creating and destroying test machines has simplified our operations and reduced manual recovery time
The Snapshot feature has helped with workflows by allowing us to more easily reconstruct something if we lose it or need it. We've been making Snapshots on a consistent basis, mainly of servers. The VX Rail has worked effectively because we can create machines as we need them. It's helpful for resetting and has helped with our operations because I had set up failover servers on Vertex, but we don't have to do that anymore since VMware will just create a new machine immediately if we have a problem. We're doing our domain servers on there, and we've been very happy with that. We appreciate that we can create machines simply to test things out and then destroy them. I use it for a test machine for checking emails, so if the email has a virus in it, we can just destroy the machine and create a new one. We're slowly moving into the VMware environment, although the pricing with Broadcom has been a disaster.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"Dual E5-2600 v3 Xeons, DDR4 memory and the best storage potential makes the PowerEdge T630 a highly versatile server."
"It has increased productivity significantly, and Dell Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) Services is stable and scalable."
"VMware Workstation’s most valuable features are backup and data transfer from one server to another."
"The Snapshot feature has helped with workflows by allowing us to more easily reconstruct something if we lose it or need it."
"This product is solid and useful for quick test/dev environments."
"VMware Workstation is easy to manage and understand."
"This product is pretty straightforward and easy to use, and I would definitely recommend it for testing different scenarios, Windows, Linux, that sort of thing."
"The features are good."
"VMware is way cheaper if I take it as an application or a software compared to any hardware."
"The most valuable feature of the VMware Workstation is the ease to create a development environment. When you have different ongoing developments, you often need to create a lot of different development environments. With this workstation solution, you can have a development environment for all the things you develop."
 

Cons

"The service needs to work on strong integration with the VMware ecosystem and improve vendor support."
"The GUI interface could be improved."
"The solution should provide a guide on its installation."
"The product could provide the features available in Microsoft Hyper-V."
"There could be more integration with different tools."
"There are only a few issues with compatibility between various virtualization tools. Moving virtual machines, for example, between VMware and Parallel is a challenge."
"VMware Workstation has some network limitations which could improve, it is not as flexible as VMware NSX."
"Its price could be better."
"The initial setup is quite easy, but can be daunting to someone unfamiliar with desktop computing environments."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"VMware is expensive. Licensing can be tricky. For example, I recently had a client running VMware vSphere Essentials and wanted to migrate to a more scalable solution. However, they had no choice but to purchase a completely new license and deploy a completely new instance of VMware."
"The licensing costs are cheap. I pay approximately $100 per year."
"The solution's pricing is almost the same as what Google Cloud, AWS, or Microsoft would charge you."
"The product is expensive."
"The cost differs depending on the customer's requirement."
"VMware Workstation has a high price than competitors in the market."
"The product has a moderate price."
"VMware Workstation is an expensive tool. I rate the product's price a three on a scale of one to ten, where one is a high price, and ten is a low or good price."
report
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Comms Service Provider
12%
University
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Computer Software Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business33
Midsize Enterprise14
Large Enterprise18
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Dell Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) Services?
Dell Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) Services can be improved by integrating more features with AI and incorporating an AI bot. Additionally, it should have strong integration with the VMware ...
What is your primary use case for Dell Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) Services?
Dell Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) Services functions as a peripheral for virtual desktop infrastructure that I use similarly with Citrix Virtual Desktop apps to work in a customer environme...
What advice do you have for others considering Dell Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) Services?
Dell Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) Services works on multifactor authentication to authenticate each user according to their MFA access, which secures registered users and gives permission t...
Which VMware solution would you go with - Workstation or vSphere?
VM Workstation’s setup is so easy, you can use it almost instantly, it works well with Windows and Linux. We like VM Workstation primarily to test environments to determine how well a solution will...
What needs improvement with VMware Player?
Here's what happened with us regarding the prices for VMware Workstation: we purchased everything through Dell, and as is common, we got busy and didn't get everything activated. By the time we tri...
What is your primary use case for VMware Player?
I have a bunch of VMware servers set up, including our domain servers, our data servers, and some test machines on VMware. We're not really using VMware Workstation as workstations. We've got a cou...
 

Also Known As

Dell Hosted Virtual Desktop Services
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Royal Opera House, University of the Sciences, Noritz America, University of the Incarnate Word (UIW), Fulton County
Akademiska Hus
Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) Services vs. VMware Workstation and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.
908,834 professionals have used our research since 2012.