VMware Workstation 15 Pro for Windows Lifetime License Key For 1 Device

I initially had problems with a Linux installation. Their customer support was exceptional and I eventually figured out the problem, which was on my end.

I purchased my license directly from VMware. My host machine is a sever running Centos 8 (recent Xeon processor, 128G RAM, RAID 5 with SSDs). I first tried using Gnome Boxes and scrapped the limited UI for virt-manager. Gnome Boxes is just a limited UI around qemu+KVM. Either way, I failed to get graphics acceleration enabled on the Ubuntu and Windows guests I installed after spending hours tweaking configuration. This is a nonstarter for graphical environment use cases (i.e. not headless or limited UI use cases where docker would fine). Disk IO speed was terrible even after tweaking the virtual disk settings (even with a fully allocated RAW file). I next tried Virtual Box and got so frustrated with the input grabbing & screen size settings that I just abandoned testing it further (I may have experienced bias after seeing that it is now an Oracle product). Finally, I downloaded a trial of VMware. After googling and figuring out that I needed to "blacklist" my graphics card (no idea what this is about ... assuming non-technical reasons), graphics acceleration works in both guests. After switching from the newer Wayland version of Gnome to the xorg x11 version, all input grabbing and screen resizing works great. Disk IO is what I'd expect given that I am using SSDs and a decent server. The VM management UI is very user friendly.