I bought
VMWare Workstation 4 a number of years ago and ran it on my Mandriva Linux host, upgrading both my host and VMware as upgrades were released.
But there were frequent occasions where it would fail to compile after an upgrade of one or the other. Then I would have to surf the web and find some any-any fix that often fixed it, or worse, some instructions on how t untar the source and make changes myself. This is software I paid for.
I got tired of that, so I switched to
VirtualBox. It also has to recompile a driver after an upgrade, but it doesn't fail.
So it doesn't surprise me to hear someone say that VMware no longer works in some context. I abandoned it. I'm glad I did.