Vagrant and VMware - all the Vs together - or not

Further to my last: -

IBM Cloud Private - Tinkering with Vagrant

I'm now looking at the options to use VMware Workstation ( this is on Linux, rather than my default home of macOS ) instead of VirtualBox.

Following this: -

https://www.vagrantup.com/docs/vmware/installation.html

I've installed the appropriate plugin: -

vagrant plugin install vagrant-vmware-workstation

Installing the 'vagrant-vmware-workstation' plugin. This can take a few minutes...
Fetching: vagrant-share-1.1.9.gem (100%)
Fetching: vagrant-vmware-workstation-5.0.3.gem (100%)
Building native extensions.  This could take a while...

Vagrant is installing the VMware plugin which requires
root access. You may be prompted for your password to
complete setup.

[sudo] password for hayd: 
Installed the plugin 'vagrant-vmware-workstation (5.0.3)'!

and validated the plugin: -

vagrant plugin list

vagrant-share (1.1.9, system)
vagrant-vmware-workstation (5.0.3)

I then updated my Vagrantfile to reflect the new choice of provider : -

vi Vagrantfile

inserting: -

...

config.vm.provider "vmware-workstation"
…

Finally, I tried (!) to bring my VM up: -

vagrant up

A valid license is required to run the Vagrant VMware
provider. Please visit http://www.vagrantup.com to purchase
a license. Once you purchase a license, you can install it
using `vagrant plugin license`.
Vagrant failed to initialize at a very early stage:

The plugins failed to load properly. The error message given is
shown below.

exit

Foiled again!

Then I read the Vagrant website more thoroughly

https://www.vagrantup.com/docs/vmware/installation.html

So I need to buy a license for the VMware Plugin from Vagrant ( aka Hashicorp ) at $80

https://www.vagrantup.com/vmware/#buy-now

Ah, well, back to VirtualBox for now …..