We performed a comparison between Parallels Remote Application Server (RAS) and VMware Workstation based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."The stability is ok - once I finished the setup, the system was quite stable."
"Valuable features include the ability to set up security groups for accessing certain apps, and the ability to add apps easily and centrally without touching the servers they’re hosted on."
"The solution is powerful, and it has good speed and performance."
"Allows us to publish applications accessible by current-generation HTML5 browser or OS-specific client (Windows, Android, iOS), and it supports popular single sign-on and multi-factor authentication protocols."
"We use RAS to publish cloud desktops to our clients. The ability to easily publish resources to a subset of users is what we find most valuable."
"It is robust. We have some 75 users using it and it doesn't lag. It's very speedy."
"The most valuable feature is the ease with which you can publish applications to different groups of users, by integrating with Windows Active Directory."
"It has allowed us to centralize the software location so we don't have to update the software client on 70 computers."
"The product's initial setup phase was simple."
"The tool’s GUI is very user-friendly."
"It's stable."
"The most valuable features of VMware Workstation are the DirectX support, you can run Microsoft Hyper-V in virtual environments which is good for me to test different installations. Additionally, you can set up different VLANs, and overall it is a complete solution."
"VMware Workstation allows you to run a virtual machine."
"Instead of relying on dual-boot operating systems, I can utilize open-source tools within my infrastructure. This approach allows me to create an in-house cloud platform suitable for testing. VMware Workstation enables me to perform tasks across various operating systems using a single device. It has helped me save time."
"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."
"Technical support is very good."
"It needs Windows scaling on Android/iOS devices. At present, the concept of delivering apps to Android and iOS devices is appealing, but the reality is the screen size on these devices is so small that, unless there is some scaling option, it is not really usable."
"Parallels Remote Application Server (RAS) is an expensive solution, and its pricing could be improved."
"Sometimes you need to understand how to use load balancing and the gateway in order to scale, which means the team may need some additional technical knowledge."
"The customization of the web interface could possibly use some improvement. Little things, like being able to place a background image instead of just choosing from a palette of colors, would be nice."
"We have had significant, ongoing issues with printing. It would be great to have a best practice for dealing with printing that we can offer to our customers."
"We use several gateways because access to our secret zone requires two-factor user authentication. It is a lot of hassle differentiating among users with or without two-factor. Of course, we could use two farms, but that would mean more management too."
"HALB is not stable in our environment. When running two HALBs we have stability problems, so we use an active one and a passive for backup. Also, it would be nice to implement an upgrade of the environment without having to stop the servers. As it is, this must be done during off-hours."
"We would like the ability to provide a popup message, such as a maintenance notification. That same notification on the Parallels client would be awesome."
"The big issue that we've always had with VMware, was the disparity between what was presented for a Windows-based client and a Linux-based client. The Windows client was always two or three releases ahead of the Linux client. We always wanted VMware to change and improve the feature sets between the client connector on Linux and on Windows."
"I would like to see more detailed reporting capabilities, particularly around snapshot activity. It would be helpful to have a summary of changes made prior to deploying an application, allowing us to provide comprehensive reports to our management on a regular basis."
"The product could provide the features available in Microsoft Hyper-V."
"It would be great if VMware Workstation had more networking options and compatibility, that would be great. I would like to deploy virtual switches and play around with networking a bit more. Otherwise, I have to deploy ESXi Virtual Edition and emulate it, which is painful and clunky."
"The GUI interface could be improved."
"I would want to see features included that make deployment easier."
"Performance could be improved, it's somewhat clunky."
"I need to buy a newer version of the tool to support Windows Server."
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Parallels Remote Application Server (RAS) is ranked 12th in Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) with 24 reviews while VMware Workstation is ranked 2nd in Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) with 41 reviews. Parallels Remote Application Server (RAS) is rated 8.8, while VMware Workstation is rated 8.8. The top reviewer of Parallels Remote Application Server (RAS) writes "Provides good scalability and a secure environment". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VMware Workstation writes "An easy-to-manage solution that has really good customer support compared to other market players". Parallels Remote Application Server (RAS) is most compared with Microsoft Remote Desktop Services, Citrix DaaS (formerly Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops service), Citrix Workspace, Parallels Desktop and VMware Horizon View, whereas VMware Workstation is most compared with Hyper-V, VMware vSphere, KVM, Proxmox VE and Oracle VM VirtualBox. See our Parallels Remote Application Server (RAS) vs. VMware Workstation report.
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