ESXi or Workstation for local VM desktop?

briancl

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Aug 2, 2007
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I use VMWare Workstation on my local laptop to do general work-related productivity (email, Word/Excel, web browsing) inside a Win 7 VM. I'm about to build an ESXi server to run some unrelated servers, and I'm wondering if there is there any performance benefit or penalty for running my desktop VM on ESXi instead of Workstation? My laptop is a quad core i7 2.2ghz, 8gb ram, and a Vertex 3 MAX IOPS SSD, so performance is quite good. The ESXi server would be about the same or better in terms of hardware, but it would be a Xeon based server and not a laptop.

How do I connect to the ESXi-hosted Win 7 VM? Can I use something like VMWare server (is this even a thing anymore?), or do I have to use a non-VMWare solution like Remote Desktop? Also, what kind of feature differences should I expect? When connected to the ESXi-hosted VM from my laptop, will I be able to use my local USB, shared folders, audio, or printers in the VM? I can do all of that now with Workstation.
 
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I would just enable RD on the win7 guest and use that. I do and it works just fine.
 
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