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I've used VMware products since 1999. You might start with VMware Server 2.x as it's free, should do everything Workstation does. Oracle VirtualBox is a free competing product, but personally I think VMware is more polished & stable. If you'll be using it for your server infrastructure on servers you already have in your department and you have a Windows 2008 system, you might consider trying Hyper-V that's included for free, depending on which guest OS you want to run. It seems to work well if you're running other Windows OS' as guests, but I was able to get Ubuntu running on it. In my opinion it's not as mature or flexible as the VMware offerings but seems to work. I have 12 virtual machines (of various OS') I use on my MacBook Air with VMware Fusion, works great! Currently I have 8 production virtual servers running on the ATS VMware infrastructure. This made sense for my two projects as the cost is much lower then running our own physical systems + storage arrays + hardware replacement + hardware maintenance + VMware software licenses + maintaining the data center + setting up two fully redundant clusters in different locations + etc . Ed Symanzik the VMware Administrator in ATS has been phenomenal to work with, very knowledgeable with the product and responsive to questions and suggestions. I'd be happy to answer any more questions I can for you Oscar, just let me know. Troy Murray Michigan State University College of Medicine B136D Life Science E: [log in to unmask] P: 517-432-2760 F: 517-355-7254 RedHat 5 Certified Technician RedHat 5 Certified Systems Administrator HL7 V2.6/2.5 Certified Control Specialist On Jan 5, 2012, at 11:17 AM, Oscar Castaneda wrote: > In an effort to simplify some complicated scenarios, we want to start to use VMware. > It goes a little like a blind exercise because we have only some basic understanding of how it works: we created a few virtual machines using VM Player, and I had been reading all I can find about it. > > I am considering now moving things one notch up. Since most of the VMware products are still apparently high priced, I thought that I would like to start using VMware Workstation to manage my few existent virtual machines and see what I can do with it so perhaps down the road I can sell the idea to my management. > > Who has experience with VMware software? Does it make sense to get Workstation and start using it? Did you buy the big software pieces? any words of wise advise? > > > oscar > > -- > Oscar Castaņeda > Global Observatory for Ecosystem Services > Michigan State University