Laravel's Homestead is amazing and makes developing PHP applications locally a breeze, but Virtualbox is painfully slow. There are some things you can do to increase performance within Vagrant/Virtualbox, like enabling NFS shared folders, but VMware has Virtualbox beat in terms of virtualized performance. I set out to make Homestead work with the vmware_desktop provider, and ran into a few issues along the way, which I'll explain below. Homestead's base image is built from another Laravel project called Settler. Settler bootstraps a base box provided by Ubuntu and installs the various services like nginx, php, redis, and mysql to speed up provision times for Homestead. My first thought was to simply run vagrant up --provider=vmware_desktop in Settler to have it build a Homestead base box for VMware. It turns out this isn't possible, because Ubuntu doesn't provide VMware boxes at all, only Virtualbox boxes. To get around this, I've submitted a pull request to change Settler's base box