A quick information card comparing VMWare Workstation 9.0 with Workstation 12.0 Pro.

The Old Version (9.0)

Usability

• There are many modal dialogs which often get in the way (example, the virtual network editor)
• Too many clicks required to get some basic information (like NIC mac addresses)
• Too many clicks to add extra hardware to VMs
• limited ability to scale virtual machines to fit monitors.

Performance

• Performance for my use case (Linux dev and test boxes, enterprise networking and Web App Firewall virtual machines, Windows Server and windows 7/8/10 VMs  for test and experimentation) is more than satisfactory. All I had to do was fully load my core i5 3570K box with 32GB of RAM (which I have yet to exhaust), and replace the spinning disk with SSDs (1.5TB worth for both bulk storage and VM disks).

Guest OS Compatibility

• As far as my experience goes, I’m able to deploy everything I want on Vmware workstation 9.0. This includes Windows Server 2012 and Windows 10.

What’s Changed?

(this is not an exhaustive list):

• It still looks and feels mostly the same as version 9.0
• The virtual network editor no longer appears to be modal which is nice
• It no longer assigns Floppy Disk controllers to new VMs — hurray!

What Hasn’t Changed?

• It still takes too many clicks to add hardware to VMs (VMWare ESX is easier in this aspect)
• Still too many clicks to find a NIC’s MAC address
• Still limited scaling options it seems (it either adjusts the VM resolution, or adjusts the window size of the hypervisor). It would be nice if it allowed you to resize a window in the hypervisor by scaling the guest OS.

What would it take for me to upgrade?

• A lower asking price

Caveat

• My use case is probably a narrow one. You should make sure you consider your own needs when evaluating version 12.0