9 ms·

VMware Fusion Pro: Now available free for personal use

332 points by ganoushoreilly 2y ago

ganoushoreilly 2y ago
I've mixed feelings on this. One side I love it's free, the annual pricing seems reasonable to what it was. On the other, i've been so burned by their pricing for everything else with clients that i'm reticent to be thankful. I suppose it's a step in the right direction, bringing back ESXI for homelab users would be a good step too.
- lostlogin 2y ago
  > bringing back ESXI for homelab users would be a good step too. It would be interesting if they did. So many have now tried Proxmox and liked it.
  - justinclift 2y ago
    Yeah. Once the Proxmox team fixed the recent kernel bug that caused migration hangs with Ryzen/EPYC hardware (~20% of migrations just hung), things have been pretty great. Presently trialling a HA cluster with it, and likely to deploy that to a local data centre in the next few weeks.
    - ganoushoreilly 2y ago
      I moved the rest of my machines to proxmox as well. I had left one ESXI just for the hell of it but I just can't leave it running even with the free Workstation pro (i'll still use it on my workstations).
- riffic 2y ago
  all the homelabbers have moved on to proxmox ve
- accrual 2y ago
  > bringing back ESXI for homelab users would be a good step too. I agree and frankly I think it was smart VMWare had a a free tier for homelab users. It produces new users who can now more easily enter the workforce with ESXi experience they might not otherwise have. By locking it down and jacking up prices they'll squeeze out more money now, but eventually the market will shift to whatever everyone has the most experience with, which might end up being Proxmox.
mickelsen 2y ago
Given that this is owned Broadcom now, and they are going all in with squeezing every last drop from ESXi and similar offerings, I wonder what's gonna happen with Fusion in the future; while now you only pay for commercial usage, maybe they are going to let it rot over the years until it's no longer cutting edge software? Would they keep it as a loss-leader?
- AshamedCaptain 2y ago
  Workstation was already rotting for all intents and purposes. Likely Fusion was also rotting since the switch to ARM but never tried it. The entire space ("desktop virtualization") is dead. Even VirtualBox which I praised a year ago seems to be slowing down. This likely just poisons the well for a market they had all but abandoned.
  - bee_rider 2y ago
    I don’t know anything about high-end workstations really. But I wonder if the whole ecosystem is in a rough spot generally? Seems like cloud tooling is always getting easier. Shame really, people do fun stuff with excess compute.
  - Thaxll 2y ago
    Virtual box was never good, it always felt half baked.
    - znpy 2y ago
      Years ago (pre-oracle) it was enough though: i have fond memories of using it with vagrant and be heppy.
      - accrual 2y ago
        Yes, when it was Sun VirtualBox I remember it was a favorite for testing out other operating systems for free with a simple UI. It wasn't the most powerful or flexible, but it's what was recommended if you wanted to (for example) try Ubuntu on your Windows host without dual boot or using another disk, etc.
johnbellone 2y ago
[flagged]
- BalinKing 2y ago
  Can you elaborate? I don't know much about this space, so I'm struggling to see any downsides given that VMware is an established name.
  - egorfine 2y ago
    Both products are rotten beyond salvation.
    - dlivingston 2y ago
      Wait, why? Here's my list of virtualization solutions on macOS. I always thought VMWare was one of the best? (Admittedly I've only briefly used it) - Parallels (the gold standard) - VMWare Fusion (second place?) - VirtualBox (haven't used it in ages) - UTM (solid OSS solution) - Docker
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
Shank 2y ago
I'm surprised they're making Workstation and Fusion free, given that they killed off the free ESXi/vSphere hypervisor. Seems strange?
- bombcar 2y ago
  I suspect they knew (and to be fair, probably correct) that a decent number of small businesses (and maybe even larger ones) were using ESXi and they just decided to shut that down in a push to get more licenses. If my theory is correct, in about two years (if they haven't killed it entirely by the) they'll introduce a "free for homelab use" variant - maybe. But Workstation and Fusion were more used by personal people and as a support tool FOR professionals, so they needed to keep those going, but charging $79 for it just wasn't worth the hassle. Notice they're not even selling ANY licenses directly anymore; you have to go through someone else. VMWare sold directly.
  - ghaff 2y ago
    Not just not worth the hassle. The product being free now means that if someone files a bug report or request for enhancement, they can more easily just shrug and say "won't fix."
    - thesnide 2y ago
      This. And evenmore, the lesser versions were free for everyone to use. But now, if you are a business you don't have any free offering anymore. I guess it makes a lot of sense, to go only after the ones that can pay, the rest would have "other" ways to run it anyway.,,
- bonton89 2y ago
  You could use Workstation Pro to directly assess VMs running on an ESXi server, so maybe the idea is to make company's more dependent upon the central infrastructure where they can squeeze. You could actually cajole the free player to do this with ESXi but it was definitely not license kosher.
- justsomehnguy 2y ago
rcarmo 2y ago
I'm trying to figure out exactly how Broadcom expects to profit from this, and what this says for their development and support roadmap.
- bhako 2y ago
  I was wondering if its related to data gathering for ai
nullstyle 2y ago
Orbstack now serves 100% of my virtualization and docker needs on macOS. Hopefully I'll never feel the need to install virtualbox or fusion or parallels ever again.
- renewiltord 2y ago
  Orbstack is really nice on an M1. But occasionally I run into the need for a GUI application and then I'm stuck. Is it possible to use Orbstack for that?
  - nullstyle 2y ago
    I haven't had that need, sorry. What applications?
    - renewiltord 2y ago
      A provider once gave me only a Java JAR graphical UI for an old Cisco VPN thing. I was on a Mac and it would only really work on Ubuntu. I used a different Ubuntu machine to get it going but would have liked to have done it on a virtualized Ubuntu. It did actually work on virtualized Ubuntu but I had to use VirtualBox and it was slow.
lenerdenator 2y ago
I mean... hooray? It's probably useful for the HomeLab crowd, but when you get an idea and want to scale it for business purposes, you get screwed by their recent commercial market moves. There's the beginnings of real FLOSS virtualization projects out there. Broadcom will make some money off of the acquisition as measured by quarterly statements, but it's not sustainable over the long run. It's not 2005 anymore. Step on enough toes and the nerds will build their own and give it away for free.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
luma 2y ago
My guess here: the product isn't valuable enough to sell off (see Horizon), the customers who buy the product aren't in their list of 600 accounts that they want to focus on, and the invoice price is a rounding error next to their enterprise offerings. Broadcom is bloodthirsty and I'd suggest they're doing this out of the goodness of their hearts but there is little evidence that they have one.
- gorkish 2y ago
  When they say "Free" what they mean is these products are now the walking dead. They are on maintenance only support until any existing commercial contracts expire at which point they will be cancelled. In this case, I admit that I think it's the right thing to do. These products don't really need to exist as commercial offerings except for a few very niche cases.
  - soneil 2y ago
    It doesn't sound like they're trying to kill them, since they're moving commercial usage to a subscription license. I'm not sure killing them actually makes a lot of sense - the products apparently share a lot of code with esxi, so it's two products for the R&D of one.
opentokix 2y ago
Don't get them get away with this, continue to migrate away from it.
bithavoc 2y ago
I don’t trust them anymore
- system2 2y ago
  Nobody does. We all moved to other hypervisors now.
CSDude 2y ago
It's almost impossible to create an account with all of the delays. Even then, I got into a loop in "Trade Compliance Verification" which does not proceed.
dist-epoch 2y ago
On Windows (Pro) Hyper-V is free, and quite good. Maybe it's less user friendly. Windows also has Sandbox (based on container technology), which replaces creating a VM to test some software without affecting the system.
- qzx_pierri 2y ago
  yeah Windows Sandbox is pretty great. I use it to test sketchy software when sailing the high seas. And the option to add shared readonly folders on the host OS is nice too.
  - TowerTall 2y ago
    How do you test sketchy software when Windows Defender is disabled in Windows Sandbox?
- haunter 2y ago
  There is the Hyper-V Server 2019 [0] too which was also free and a standalone OS unlike the current version. I use that on a 2nd PC, you can also install a full GUI [1] on top of the webadmin interface so pretty good actually. 0, https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/evaluate-hyper-v-server-2019 https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/evaluate-hyper-v-... 1, https://gist.github.com/bp2008/922b326bf30222b51da08146746c7c27 https://gist.github.com/bp2008/922b326bf30222b51da08146746c7...
- gettodachoppa 2y ago
  Anyone reading this, don't expect a smooth experience for desktop Linux under Hyper-V. Hyper-V's team only cares about supporting servers. You're not gonna run a full-screen Ubuntu VM without a lot of banging your head against the wall, unless you spend days trawling random Github comments and reddit posts and fixing it whenever it breaks.
  - dist-epoch 2y ago
    If you want Ubuntu use Hyper-V Quick Create instead of booting the .iso you downloaded. That takes care of the integration things.
ryanmccullagh 2y ago
I had purchased Fusion Pro recently due to the better graphics support in comparison to VirtualBox. I wonder what the catch is here.
flaxton 2y ago
Download doesn't seem to work. The VMware download area closed in late April, and can't seem to download Fusion now. The replacement store doesn't seem to be available yet. I'm using Parallels and it is great on an Apple Silicon Mac, but I'm a long-time VMware Workstation and Fusion user, so I'd like to try it again.
- kevingadd 2y ago
  As a paying Workstation customer, I had to install it from scratch the other day and couldn't find a binary anywhere. I eventually found an old installer on archive.org (!) and settled for that. Grateful to whoever had the foresight to point the Wayback Machine at VMWare's CDN before it was too late.
  - trollbridge 2y ago
    And we paying customers did buy a perpetual licence. Better archive that download and save your key somewhere…
- skydhash 2y ago
  You have to go over to Broadcom website. The VMware store is still down.
raybb 2y ago
What timing. Literally yesterday I was trying to set this up on my Mac and went with UTM instead. It worked excellently for getting Kali Linux up and doing a WLAN USB passthrough.
- whalesalad 2y ago
  Fortunately the open-source VM space is the best it has ever been these days. No reason at all to use proprietary crap anymore.
  - nxobject 2y ago
    I've had a lot of frustration getting the SPICE tools to work with slightly older Windows OSes (Windows 7 in my case), for what it's worth.
  - jareds 2y ago
    What open source options would you recommend for running Linux and Windows VM's on Windows? I've been unhappy with Virtualbox because the audio quality is abysmal which is an issue since I use screen reading software. I'm interested to try out VMWare Workstation since it's audio support was pretty good many years ago when I used it at a prior job.
    - whalesalad 2y ago
      Hyper-V? I don't run VM's on windows, only on Mac and Linux. I'd imagine a first class hypervisor like Hyper-V is the way to go on that platform. AFAIK it is included with Pro versions of Windows.
  - darby_eight 2y ago
    Performant 3d acceleration in the guest OS is still quite difficult to find an open source solution for, and linux these days relies heavily on this for window management. Mac hosts at least have ParavirtualizedGraphics, even though I don't think the popular open source clients have support for it yet.
segasaturn 2y ago
They're very late to do this IMO, but better late than never. I am certain that VMWare has not been selling many Workstation licenses to personal users (costing ~$300 each) and making the products free gives free advertising and mindshare to VMWare. Visual Studio is a good example of this, Microsoft making Visual Studio free for personal use in 2014 provided a huge boost to a platform that a lot of people had written off as dead, irrelevant, gray corporate software.
- chrisandchris 2y ago
  Except that VMWare is owned by Broadcom, which is known for only being interested in Fortune 500. That doesn't at all apply to Microsoft. No sane people will buy into VMWare anymore if 500k in cash is not a rounding error of your budget.
- IshKebab 2y ago
  > to a platform that a lot of people had written off as dead, irrelevant, gray corporate software. I don't think many people had written Visual Studio off like that in 2014. Maybe now, given VSCode. But that didn't exist in 2014.
- darby_eight 2y ago
  What is Visual Studio used for these days? Of course windows development, and I'm guessing xbox development too. Anything else?
  - DannyWebbie 2y ago
    Primary IDE for Unity and Unreal. Microsoft has been extending beyond Microsoft platforms, so I imagine a decent chunk of Visual Studio use is for cross-platform development.
  - oblio 2y ago
    I'm guessing it's still the IDE of choice of game devs.
  - Kipters 2y ago
dmitrygr 2y ago
Now go try to download it. All links are broken. https://knowledge.broadcom.com/external/article?articleNumber=315638 https://knowledge.broadcom.com/external/article?articleNumbe... https://www.vmware.com/content/vmware/vmware-published-sites/us/products/desktop-hypervisor.html.html https://www.vmware.com/content/vmware/vmware-published-sites... https://customerconnect.vmware.com/web/vmware/downloads/info/slug/desktop_end_user_computing/vmware_fusion/13_0 https://customerconnect.vmware.com/web/vmware/downloads/info...
- gruez 2y ago
  Found a mirror here: https://github.com/201853910/VMwareWorkstation/releases/tag/17.0 https://github.com/201853910/VMwareWorkstation/releases/tag/... The windows binaries have valid authenticode signatures so at least those haven't been tampered with.
- laweijfmvo 2y ago
  > Here is a simple KB that describes what to do: http://kb.vmware.com/s/article/97817 http://kb.vmware.com/s/article/97817 Another broken link...
- Stagnant 2y ago
  I spent like 15 minutes trying to find an official download link, even registered a broadcom account but that was a waste of time as well. Ended up finding a working download link from some reddit comment. It seems to contain all versions of fusion, player, workstation and remote console. https://softwareupdate.vmware.com/cds/vmw-desktop/ws/ https://softwareupdate.vmware.com/cds/vmw-desktop/ws/
  - rekoil 2y ago
    I had an expired trial license, after updating it now prompts me that my license is expired, but then seems to work just fine instead of closing haha. Thanks for the link!
  - justinclift 2y ago
    Cool, this is the working direct download repository with indexing enabled. :)
tw04 2y ago
This is how you know that they're not putting another dime into R&D.
system2 2y ago
Who cares. They killed ESXi. They are no use to SMBs and people who want to learn virtualization.
michaelmrose 2y ago
Does this offer anything over virt-manager on Linux?
- justinclift 2y ago
  Really good snapshot capabilities, if that's your kind of thing. Workstation (and Fusion too I think) also provide DirectX 10 + 11 support in Windows VMs. So if you're wanting to run software that uses that in a Windows, you'll need something like Workstation or Fusion since virt-manager can't (yet) do that.
fulafel 2y ago
The ransomware epidemics targeting ESXi vulnerabilities probably triggered an exodus to other hypervisors and this could be an attempt to hang on to some users.
throwitaway222 2y ago
I mysteriously stopped needing vmware or virtualbox the year docker came out, I wonder why...
- belter 2y ago
  "7 Ways to Escape a Container" - https://www.panoptica.app/research/7-ways-to-escape-a-container https://www.panoptica.app/research/7-ways-to-escape-a-contai...
  - gettodachoppa 2y ago
    I'm a casual Docker user, ran maybe 30 images my whole life. I've never used any of these flags and didn't know most of them even existed. Are these serious threats? I mean it seems like common sense that if you give a malicious container elevated privileges, it can do bad stuff. Is a VM any different? If you create a VM and add your host's / directory as a share with write permissions (allowing the VM to modify your host filesystem/binaries) does that mean VMs are bad at isolation and shouldn't be used? Because that's what these "7 ways to escaper a container" ways look like to me.
    - belter 2y ago
      Containers are called "Leaky Vessels" for a reason... "Container Escape: New Vulnerabilities Affecting Docker and RunC" - https://www.paloaltonetworks.com/blog/prisma-cloud/leaky-vessels-vulnerabilities-container-escape/ https://www.paloaltonetworks.com/blog/prisma-cloud/leaky-ves... VMs offer a much better isolation mode.
      - gettodachoppa 2y ago
        Thanks, that link made me much more confident in using Docker. I mean come on: "Attackers could try to exploit this issue by causing the user to build two malicious images at the same time, which can be done by poisoning the registry, typosquatting or other methods" So basically ridiculous CVEs that will never affect people not in the habit of building random Dockerfiles off Github with 2 stars. Good to know. Only the 1st one isn't dismissable out of hand, I can't tell if it's bogus like the rest./
pjmlp 2y ago
Since Microsoft came up with WSL, I no longer have the need for VMWare Workstation. This is how products get killed.
- gettodachoppa 2y ago
  I'm the opposite, I need these desktop hypervisors because Hyper-V is trash for anything but a WSL shell or server VM. I upgraded to Windows 11 for WSLg (figuring it would replace my Linux desktop), and it was buggy trash. You can't even get a high-resolution Ubuntu desktop (from Microsoft themselves, their own quickbox!) without jumping through hoops, searching all over reddit for knowledge obsoleted by the next update, tweaking arcane settings and running misc Powershell scripts. To say nothing of the occasional freezes. By enabling WSL2/WSLg, your Windows host is now a privileged guest running under Hyper-V as a hypervisor. Which means lightweight desktop hypervisors like Virtualbox run like trash. I ended up removing WSLg/turning Hyper-V off, using Virtualbox for desktop Linux, and using WSL1 (not 2) to have a quick Linux shell without enabling Hyper-V. I'm now considering Workstation due to the superior graphics in the guest over Virtualbox.
  - pjmlp 2y ago
    If you are running Windows 10 with secure kernel, driver guard, among others, this features require Hyper-V. Secondly Windows 11 doubles even more on having Hyper-V running for even more security capabilities. I also think the future is type 1 hypervisors, and in regards to performance, my computers are beefy enough to hardly notice any major impact. As for Linux configuration problems, business as usual, there is always something that needs hand holding, and I have been using distributions since Slackware 2.0 in 1995's Summer. I also mostly used Virtualbox only when not allowed to use VMWare products, due to cheap project delivery conditions.
trollbridge 2y ago
Have been a happy Fusion Pro customer for years, including buying upgrades. A user can install 5 seats which includes both Workstation and Fusion, so I could have it on my Mac desktop, iMac, and Linux desktop. The licence was very clear it is kosher for commercial use. And it was perpetual, no worrying about annual renewals. Beware the new “free” licence, which is emphatically not for commercial use. Get caught accidentally using the personal licence and your company will be on the hook to pay whatever Broadcom wants you to pay. Oracle did similar shenanigans with VirtualBox (watch out if you download the extension pack) and Java (watch out if you install a JRE on your desktop and use it to compile/develop certain software!) This does open a market opportunity for Corel/Parallels which is mostly at feature parity with VMware… the main reason I liked using VMware Fusion was solid integration with ESXi, which also won’t be a concern anymore as with the Broadcom acquisition that’s a platform I’ll be trying to avoid.
- ganoushoreilly 2y ago
  They provided the method for continuing to purchase the license (much the same way it was before with digital river). $120 annually.
  - senectus1 2y ago
    Controlling/watching for that in a large env is going to be a pita.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  > Beware the new “free” licence, which is emphatically not for commercial use. Get caught accidentally using the personal licence and your company will be on the hook to pay whatever Broadcom wants you to pay Common way to do this would be to keep an eye out for large fundraises, and then track back to see if you can catch them using the personal license early on.
andyjohnson0 2y ago
I used to have (paid, personal) VMware Workstation licence, but switched to VirtualBox after they stopped updating Workstation and a windows update stopped it working. I thought it was a decent product. I'd rather not use an Oracle product (VB) but are there any advantages in switching back? Main use is running Ubuntu VMs on Windows.
INTPenis 2y ago
This is probably the first step to shutting down development of these products. First of all every desktop now has its own mature virtualization. And secondly, Broadcom has no interest in this market.
downrightmike 2y ago
Wonder how much tracking shit got crammed in recently
AYBABTME 2y ago
Pro free for now, or Pro is free abandonware. Both cases discourage adoption. Open-source would help if there's any desire to keep it alive, otherwise this is a nice gesture but I would read this as a signal that I should stick away from it because it's dead or a trap.
- swarnie 2y ago
  Who is spinning up home test environments looking for decades of support? My VMs are doing pretty well if they last the quarter.
  - plorkyeran 2y ago
    We have a whole bunch of automation built around VMWare Fusion for creating and deploying macOS VMs (for CI testing). The VMs aren't long-lived, but the code using VMWare Fusion certainly is and it's a nontrivial project to migrate to a different virtualization system. Thankfully for us we were already planning to do that migration before the acquisition.
bzmrgonz 2y ago
MEH!!! qemu for the win! "Hardware Virtualization Support: Qemu is capable of running virtual machines without hardware virtualization support, also known as software virtualization. On the other hand, VMware Fusion requires hardware-assisted virtualization to run virtual machines efficiently."
bhako 2y ago
Fuck me, i just drop it to use vbox. I migrated all my vms.
oblio 2y ago
I love how many people just aren't reading the article. First of all it's both Fusion, the Mac software and Workstation, the Windows one. Secondly, they're making them free for personal use. They're still paid for commercial use and it's going to be a subscription.
- justinclift 2y ago
  > ... and Workstation, the Windows one. Workstation also runs on Linux. :) As a data point for anyone else running it on Linux, this repo is probably what you should keep an eye on for updated VMware modules that work with newer kernels: https://github.com/mkubecek/vmware-host-modules https://github.com/mkubecek/vmware-host-modules The ones bundled in VMware Workstation officially tend to break in weird ways as new kernels come along. (!)
oblio 2y ago
Separate note: what do folks use to virtualize Windows on Linux? Is anything good enough to run older games in Windows in a VM? Think Dota 2 (I know it's available for Linux, just using it as a perf reference).
- m463 2y ago
  Proxmox can do this. It is free software. It will work best if you passthrough your graphics card. I also passed through a USB controller and used my dac for sound. You can run most versions of windows in a VM, also macos and linux.
- moondev 2y ago
  quickemu is great for this
_8j50 2y ago
I paid for it already lol. Should it not be "broadcom fusion" now? I am already getting emails about migrating my vmware account to broadcom.
- senectus1 2y ago
  >Should it not be "broadcom fusion" now? Given Broadcom's actions they need to rename it to "Broadcom fission" :-P
  - _8j50 2y ago
    Good one!
berniedurfee 2y ago
Shoot. I saw Fusion and thought Autodesk. I’d forgotten that VMware was still a thing.
manishsharan 2y ago
Proxmox is completely free to download and deploy without any cost. For commercial and personal use.
- ricktdotorg 2y ago
  my longterm homelab of ESXi 6.x on Intel NUC with unlimited license hack recently blew up (repeated power surges, no UPS). went with Intel NUC again but proxmox instead for the rebuild and its been a dream so far. i don't miss ESXi or Vmware in general one bit.
  - manishsharan 2y ago
    This is my setup: Nuc +Proxmox+ K3S. My goal is to set up a Kubernetes Cluster spanning 2 NUCs with K3S to build my playground for any application I decide to develop.
rekabis 2y ago
For this who use this product, a query: I have been using Hyper-V since the early days, and run it on both my development iron (Win11 23H2, heavily castrated) as well as my personal (non-commercial) Win2k22 21H2 Datacentre servers. Why should I choose VMware over Hyper-V? Genuinely curious.
raminf 2y ago
Started as a Fusion user, then Parallels on the Mac. Then back to Fusion. Each Windows or MacOS update would break something. Toggled back and forth maybe 5-6 times. Finally settled on Parallels and stopped upgrading Fusion. Haven't had problems since. Glad it's free now, but that sometimes means the company is going to stop investing in it.

I've mixed feelings on this. One side I love it's free, the annual pricing seems reasonable to what it was. On the other, i've been so burned by their pricing for everything else with clients that i'm reticent to be thankful. I suppose it's a step in the right direction, bringing back ESXI for homelab users would be a good step too.

lostlogin 2y ago
> bringing back ESXI for homelab users would be a good step too. It would be interesting if they did. So many have now tried Proxmox and liked it.
- justinclift 2y ago
  Yeah. Once the Proxmox team fixed the recent kernel bug that caused migration hangs with Ryzen/EPYC hardware (~20% of migrations just hung), things have been pretty great. Presently trialling a HA cluster with it, and likely to deploy that to a local data centre in the next few weeks.
  - ganoushoreilly 2y ago
    I moved the rest of my machines to proxmox as well. I had left one ESXI just for the hell of it but I just can't leave it running even with the free Workstation pro (i'll still use it on my workstations).
riffic 2y ago
all the homelabbers have moved on to proxmox ve
accrual 2y ago
> bringing back ESXI for homelab users would be a good step too. I agree and frankly I think it was smart VMWare had a a free tier for homelab users. It produces new users who can now more easily enter the workforce with ESXi experience they might not otherwise have. By locking it down and jacking up prices they'll squeeze out more money now, but eventually the market will shift to whatever everyone has the most experience with, which might end up being Proxmox.

mickelsen 2y ago

Given that this is owned Broadcom now, and they are going all in with squeezing every last drop from ESXi and similar offerings, I wonder what's gonna happen with Fusion in the future; while now you only pay for commercial usage, maybe they are going to let it rot over the years until it's no longer cutting edge software? Would they keep it as a loss-leader?

AshamedCaptain 2y ago
Workstation was already rotting for all intents and purposes. Likely Fusion was also rotting since the switch to ARM but never tried it. The entire space ("desktop virtualization") is dead. Even VirtualBox which I praised a year ago seems to be slowing down. This likely just poisons the well for a market they had all but abandoned.
- bee_rider 2y ago
  I don’t know anything about high-end workstations really. But I wonder if the whole ecosystem is in a rough spot generally? Seems like cloud tooling is always getting easier. Shame really, people do fun stuff with excess compute.
- Thaxll 2y ago
  Virtual box was never good, it always felt half baked.
  - znpy 2y ago
    Years ago (pre-oracle) it was enough though: i have fond memories of using it with vagrant and be heppy.
    - accrual 2y ago
      Yes, when it was Sun VirtualBox I remember it was a favorite for testing out other operating systems for free with a simple UI. It wasn't the most powerful or flexible, but it's what was recommended if you wanted to (for example) try Ubuntu on your Windows host without dual boot or using another disk, etc.

johnbellone 2y ago

[flagged]

BalinKing 2y ago
Can you elaborate? I don't know much about this space, so I'm struggling to see any downsides given that VMware is an established name.
- egorfine 2y ago
  Both products are rotten beyond salvation.
  - dlivingston 2y ago
    Wait, why? Here's my list of virtualization solutions on macOS. I always thought VMWare was one of the best? (Admittedly I've only briefly used it) - Parallels (the gold standard) - VMWare Fusion (second place?) - VirtualBox (haven't used it in ages) - UTM (solid OSS solution) - Docker
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

Shank 2y ago

I'm surprised they're making Workstation and Fusion free, given that they killed off the free ESXi/vSphere hypervisor. Seems strange?

bombcar 2y ago
I suspect they knew (and to be fair, probably correct) that a decent number of small businesses (and maybe even larger ones) were using ESXi and they just decided to shut that down in a push to get more licenses. If my theory is correct, in about two years (if they haven't killed it entirely by the) they'll introduce a "free for homelab use" variant - maybe. But Workstation and Fusion were more used by personal people and as a support tool FOR professionals, so they needed to keep those going, but charging $79 for it just wasn't worth the hassle. Notice they're not even selling ANY licenses directly anymore; you have to go through someone else. VMWare sold directly.
- ghaff 2y ago
  Not just not worth the hassle. The product being free now means that if someone files a bug report or request for enhancement, they can more easily just shrug and say "won't fix."
  - thesnide 2y ago
    This. And evenmore, the lesser versions were free for everyone to use. But now, if you are a business you don't have any free offering anymore. I guess it makes a lot of sense, to go only after the ones that can pay, the rest would have "other" ways to run it anyway.,,
bonton89 2y ago
You could use Workstation Pro to directly assess VMs running on an ESXi server, so maybe the idea is to make company's more dependent upon the central infrastructure where they can squeeze. You could actually cajole the free player to do this with ESXi but it was definitely not license kosher.
justsomehnguy 2y ago

rcarmo 2y ago

I'm trying to figure out exactly how Broadcom expects to profit from this, and what this says for their development and support roadmap.

bhako 2y ago
I was wondering if its related to data gathering for ai

nullstyle 2y ago

Orbstack now serves 100% of my virtualization and docker needs on macOS. Hopefully I'll never feel the need to install virtualbox or fusion or parallels ever again.

renewiltord 2y ago
Orbstack is really nice on an M1. But occasionally I run into the need for a GUI application and then I'm stuck. Is it possible to use Orbstack for that?
- nullstyle 2y ago
  I haven't had that need, sorry. What applications?
  - renewiltord 2y ago
    A provider once gave me only a Java JAR graphical UI for an old Cisco VPN thing. I was on a Mac and it would only really work on Ubuntu. I used a different Ubuntu machine to get it going but would have liked to have done it on a virtualized Ubuntu. It did actually work on virtualized Ubuntu but I had to use VirtualBox and it was slow.

lenerdenator 2y ago

I mean... hooray? It's probably useful for the HomeLab crowd, but when you get an idea and want to scale it for business purposes, you get screwed by their recent commercial market moves. There's the beginnings of real FLOSS virtualization projects out there. Broadcom will make some money off of the acquisition as measured by quarterly statements, but it's not sustainable over the long run. It's not 2005 anymore. Step on enough toes and the nerds will build their own and give it away for free.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

luma 2y ago

My guess here: the product isn't valuable enough to sell off (see Horizon), the customers who buy the product aren't in their list of 600 accounts that they want to focus on, and the invoice price is a rounding error next to their enterprise offerings. Broadcom is bloodthirsty and I'd suggest they're doing this out of the goodness of their hearts but there is little evidence that they have one.

gorkish 2y ago
When they say "Free" what they mean is these products are now the walking dead. They are on maintenance only support until any existing commercial contracts expire at which point they will be cancelled. In this case, I admit that I think it's the right thing to do. These products don't really need to exist as commercial offerings except for a few very niche cases.
- soneil 2y ago
  It doesn't sound like they're trying to kill them, since they're moving commercial usage to a subscription license. I'm not sure killing them actually makes a lot of sense - the products apparently share a lot of code with esxi, so it's two products for the R&D of one.

opentokix 2y ago

Don't get them get away with this, continue to migrate away from it.

bithavoc 2y ago

I don’t trust them anymore

system2 2y ago
Nobody does. We all moved to other hypervisors now.

CSDude 2y ago

It's almost impossible to create an account with all of the delays. Even then, I got into a loop in "Trade Compliance Verification" which does not proceed.

dist-epoch 2y ago

On Windows (Pro) Hyper-V is free, and quite good. Maybe it's less user friendly. Windows also has Sandbox (based on container technology), which replaces creating a VM to test some software without affecting the system.

qzx_pierri 2y ago
yeah Windows Sandbox is pretty great. I use it to test sketchy software when sailing the high seas. And the option to add shared readonly folders on the host OS is nice too.
- TowerTall 2y ago
  How do you test sketchy software when Windows Defender is disabled in Windows Sandbox?
haunter 2y ago
There is the Hyper-V Server 2019 [0] too which was also free and a standalone OS unlike the current version. I use that on a 2nd PC, you can also install a full GUI [1] on top of the webadmin interface so pretty good actually. 0, https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/evaluate-hyper-v-server-2019 https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/evaluate-hyper-v-... 1, https://gist.github.com/bp2008/922b326bf30222b51da08146746c7c27 https://gist.github.com/bp2008/922b326bf30222b51da08146746c7...
gettodachoppa 2y ago
Anyone reading this, don't expect a smooth experience for desktop Linux under Hyper-V. Hyper-V's team only cares about supporting servers. You're not gonna run a full-screen Ubuntu VM without a lot of banging your head against the wall, unless you spend days trawling random Github comments and reddit posts and fixing it whenever it breaks.
- dist-epoch 2y ago
  If you want Ubuntu use Hyper-V Quick Create instead of booting the .iso you downloaded. That takes care of the integration things.

ryanmccullagh 2y ago

I had purchased Fusion Pro recently due to the better graphics support in comparison to VirtualBox. I wonder what the catch is here.

flaxton 2y ago

Download doesn't seem to work. The VMware download area closed in late April, and can't seem to download Fusion now. The replacement store doesn't seem to be available yet. I'm using Parallels and it is great on an Apple Silicon Mac, but I'm a long-time VMware Workstation and Fusion user, so I'd like to try it again.

kevingadd 2y ago
As a paying Workstation customer, I had to install it from scratch the other day and couldn't find a binary anywhere. I eventually found an old installer on archive.org (!) and settled for that. Grateful to whoever had the foresight to point the Wayback Machine at VMWare's CDN before it was too late.
- trollbridge 2y ago
  And we paying customers did buy a perpetual licence. Better archive that download and save your key somewhere…
skydhash 2y ago
You have to go over to Broadcom website. The VMware store is still down.

raybb 2y ago

What timing. Literally yesterday I was trying to set this up on my Mac and went with UTM instead. It worked excellently for getting Kali Linux up and doing a WLAN USB passthrough.

whalesalad 2y ago
Fortunately the open-source VM space is the best it has ever been these days. No reason at all to use proprietary crap anymore.
- nxobject 2y ago
  I've had a lot of frustration getting the SPICE tools to work with slightly older Windows OSes (Windows 7 in my case), for what it's worth.
- jareds 2y ago
  What open source options would you recommend for running Linux and Windows VM's on Windows? I've been unhappy with Virtualbox because the audio quality is abysmal which is an issue since I use screen reading software. I'm interested to try out VMWare Workstation since it's audio support was pretty good many years ago when I used it at a prior job.
  - whalesalad 2y ago
    Hyper-V? I don't run VM's on windows, only on Mac and Linux. I'd imagine a first class hypervisor like Hyper-V is the way to go on that platform. AFAIK it is included with Pro versions of Windows.
- darby_eight 2y ago
  Performant 3d acceleration in the guest OS is still quite difficult to find an open source solution for, and linux these days relies heavily on this for window management. Mac hosts at least have ParavirtualizedGraphics, even though I don't think the popular open source clients have support for it yet.

segasaturn 2y ago

They're very late to do this IMO, but better late than never. I am certain that VMWare has not been selling many Workstation licenses to personal users (costing ~$300 each) and making the products free gives free advertising and mindshare to VMWare. Visual Studio is a good example of this, Microsoft making Visual Studio free for personal use in 2014 provided a huge boost to a platform that a lot of people had written off as dead, irrelevant, gray corporate software.

chrisandchris 2y ago
Except that VMWare is owned by Broadcom, which is known for only being interested in Fortune 500. That doesn't at all apply to Microsoft. No sane people will buy into VMWare anymore if 500k in cash is not a rounding error of your budget.
IshKebab 2y ago
> to a platform that a lot of people had written off as dead, irrelevant, gray corporate software. I don't think many people had written Visual Studio off like that in 2014. Maybe now, given VSCode. But that didn't exist in 2014.
darby_eight 2y ago
What is Visual Studio used for these days? Of course windows development, and I'm guessing xbox development too. Anything else?
- DannyWebbie 2y ago
  Primary IDE for Unity and Unreal. Microsoft has been extending beyond Microsoft platforms, so I imagine a decent chunk of Visual Studio use is for cross-platform development.
- oblio 2y ago
  I'm guessing it's still the IDE of choice of game devs.
- Kipters 2y ago

dmitrygr 2y ago

Now go try to download it. All links are broken. https://knowledge.broadcom.com/external/article?articleNumber=315638 https://knowledge.broadcom.com/external/article?articleNumbe... https://www.vmware.com/content/vmware/vmware-published-sites/us/products/desktop-hypervisor.html.html https://www.vmware.com/content/vmware/vmware-published-sites... https://customerconnect.vmware.com/web/vmware/downloads/info/slug/desktop_end_user_computing/vmware_fusion/13_0 https://customerconnect.vmware.com/web/vmware/downloads/info...

gruez 2y ago
Found a mirror here: https://github.com/201853910/VMwareWorkstation/releases/tag/17.0 https://github.com/201853910/VMwareWorkstation/releases/tag/... The windows binaries have valid authenticode signatures so at least those haven't been tampered with.
laweijfmvo 2y ago
> Here is a simple KB that describes what to do: http://kb.vmware.com/s/article/97817 http://kb.vmware.com/s/article/97817 Another broken link...
Stagnant 2y ago
I spent like 15 minutes trying to find an official download link, even registered a broadcom account but that was a waste of time as well. Ended up finding a working download link from some reddit comment. It seems to contain all versions of fusion, player, workstation and remote console. https://softwareupdate.vmware.com/cds/vmw-desktop/ws/ https://softwareupdate.vmware.com/cds/vmw-desktop/ws/
- rekoil 2y ago
  I had an expired trial license, after updating it now prompts me that my license is expired, but then seems to work just fine instead of closing haha. Thanks for the link!
- justinclift 2y ago
  Cool, this is the working direct download repository with indexing enabled. :)

tw04 2y ago

This is how you know that they're not putting another dime into R&D.

system2 2y ago

Who cares. They killed ESXi. They are no use to SMBs and people who want to learn virtualization.

michaelmrose 2y ago

Does this offer anything over virt-manager on Linux?

justinclift 2y ago
Really good snapshot capabilities, if that's your kind of thing. Workstation (and Fusion too I think) also provide DirectX 10 + 11 support in Windows VMs. So if you're wanting to run software that uses that in a Windows, you'll need something like Workstation or Fusion since virt-manager can't (yet) do that.

fulafel 2y ago

The ransomware epidemics targeting ESXi vulnerabilities probably triggered an exodus to other hypervisors and this could be an attempt to hang on to some users.

throwitaway222 2y ago

I mysteriously stopped needing vmware or virtualbox the year docker came out, I wonder why...

belter 2y ago
"7 Ways to Escape a Container" - https://www.panoptica.app/research/7-ways-to-escape-a-container https://www.panoptica.app/research/7-ways-to-escape-a-contai...
- gettodachoppa 2y ago
  I'm a casual Docker user, ran maybe 30 images my whole life. I've never used any of these flags and didn't know most of them even existed. Are these serious threats? I mean it seems like common sense that if you give a malicious container elevated privileges, it can do bad stuff. Is a VM any different? If you create a VM and add your host's / directory as a share with write permissions (allowing the VM to modify your host filesystem/binaries) does that mean VMs are bad at isolation and shouldn't be used? Because that's what these "7 ways to escaper a container" ways look like to me.
  - belter 2y ago
    Containers are called "Leaky Vessels" for a reason... "Container Escape: New Vulnerabilities Affecting Docker and RunC" - https://www.paloaltonetworks.com/blog/prisma-cloud/leaky-vessels-vulnerabilities-container-escape/ https://www.paloaltonetworks.com/blog/prisma-cloud/leaky-ves... VMs offer a much better isolation mode.
    - gettodachoppa 2y ago
      Thanks, that link made me much more confident in using Docker. I mean come on: "Attackers could try to exploit this issue by causing the user to build two malicious images at the same time, which can be done by poisoning the registry, typosquatting or other methods" So basically ridiculous CVEs that will never affect people not in the habit of building random Dockerfiles off Github with 2 stars. Good to know. Only the 1st one isn't dismissable out of hand, I can't tell if it's bogus like the rest./

pjmlp 2y ago

Since Microsoft came up with WSL, I no longer have the need for VMWare Workstation. This is how products get killed.

gettodachoppa 2y ago
I'm the opposite, I need these desktop hypervisors because Hyper-V is trash for anything but a WSL shell or server VM. I upgraded to Windows 11 for WSLg (figuring it would replace my Linux desktop), and it was buggy trash. You can't even get a high-resolution Ubuntu desktop (from Microsoft themselves, their own quickbox!) without jumping through hoops, searching all over reddit for knowledge obsoleted by the next update, tweaking arcane settings and running misc Powershell scripts. To say nothing of the occasional freezes. By enabling WSL2/WSLg, your Windows host is now a privileged guest running under Hyper-V as a hypervisor. Which means lightweight desktop hypervisors like Virtualbox run like trash. I ended up removing WSLg/turning Hyper-V off, using Virtualbox for desktop Linux, and using WSL1 (not 2) to have a quick Linux shell without enabling Hyper-V. I'm now considering Workstation due to the superior graphics in the guest over Virtualbox.
- pjmlp 2y ago
  If you are running Windows 10 with secure kernel, driver guard, among others, this features require Hyper-V. Secondly Windows 11 doubles even more on having Hyper-V running for even more security capabilities. I also think the future is type 1 hypervisors, and in regards to performance, my computers are beefy enough to hardly notice any major impact. As for Linux configuration problems, business as usual, there is always something that needs hand holding, and I have been using distributions since Slackware 2.0 in 1995's Summer. I also mostly used Virtualbox only when not allowed to use VMWare products, due to cheap project delivery conditions.

trollbridge 2y ago

Have been a happy Fusion Pro customer for years, including buying upgrades. A user can install 5 seats which includes both Workstation and Fusion, so I could have it on my Mac desktop, iMac, and Linux desktop. The licence was very clear it is kosher for commercial use. And it was perpetual, no worrying about annual renewals. Beware the new “free” licence, which is emphatically not for commercial use. Get caught accidentally using the personal licence and your company will be on the hook to pay whatever Broadcom wants you to pay. Oracle did similar shenanigans with VirtualBox (watch out if you download the extension pack) and Java (watch out if you install a JRE on your desktop and use it to compile/develop certain software!) This does open a market opportunity for Corel/Parallels which is mostly at feature parity with VMware… the main reason I liked using VMware Fusion was solid integration with ESXi, which also won’t be a concern anymore as with the Broadcom acquisition that’s a platform I’ll be trying to avoid.

ganoushoreilly 2y ago
They provided the method for continuing to purchase the license (much the same way it was before with digital river). $120 annually.
- senectus1 2y ago
  Controlling/watching for that in a large env is going to be a pita.
JumpCrisscross 2y ago
> Beware the new “free” licence, which is emphatically not for commercial use. Get caught accidentally using the personal licence and your company will be on the hook to pay whatever Broadcom wants you to pay Common way to do this would be to keep an eye out for large fundraises, and then track back to see if you can catch them using the personal license early on.

andyjohnson0 2y ago

I used to have (paid, personal) VMware Workstation licence, but switched to VirtualBox after they stopped updating Workstation and a windows update stopped it working. I thought it was a decent product. I'd rather not use an Oracle product (VB) but are there any advantages in switching back? Main use is running Ubuntu VMs on Windows.

INTPenis 2y ago

This is probably the first step to shutting down development of these products. First of all every desktop now has its own mature virtualization. And secondly, Broadcom has no interest in this market.

downrightmike 2y ago

Wonder how much tracking shit got crammed in recently

AYBABTME 2y ago

Pro free for now, or Pro is free abandonware. Both cases discourage adoption. Open-source would help if there's any desire to keep it alive, otherwise this is a nice gesture but I would read this as a signal that I should stick away from it because it's dead or a trap.

swarnie 2y ago
Who is spinning up home test environments looking for decades of support? My VMs are doing pretty well if they last the quarter.
- plorkyeran 2y ago
  We have a whole bunch of automation built around VMWare Fusion for creating and deploying macOS VMs (for CI testing). The VMs aren't long-lived, but the code using VMWare Fusion certainly is and it's a nontrivial project to migrate to a different virtualization system. Thankfully for us we were already planning to do that migration before the acquisition.

bzmrgonz 2y ago

MEH!!! qemu for the win! "Hardware Virtualization Support: Qemu is capable of running virtual machines without hardware virtualization support, also known as software virtualization. On the other hand, VMware Fusion requires hardware-assisted virtualization to run virtual machines efficiently."

bhako 2y ago

Fuck me, i just drop it to use vbox. I migrated all my vms.

oblio 2y ago

I love how many people just aren't reading the article. First of all it's both Fusion, the Mac software and Workstation, the Windows one. Secondly, they're making them free for personal use. They're still paid for commercial use and it's going to be a subscription.

justinclift 2y ago
> ... and Workstation, the Windows one. Workstation also runs on Linux. :) As a data point for anyone else running it on Linux, this repo is probably what you should keep an eye on for updated VMware modules that work with newer kernels: https://github.com/mkubecek/vmware-host-modules https://github.com/mkubecek/vmware-host-modules The ones bundled in VMware Workstation officially tend to break in weird ways as new kernels come along. (!)

oblio 2y ago

Separate note: what do folks use to virtualize Windows on Linux? Is anything good enough to run older games in Windows in a VM? Think Dota 2 (I know it's available for Linux, just using it as a perf reference).

m463 2y ago
Proxmox can do this. It is free software. It will work best if you passthrough your graphics card. I also passed through a USB controller and used my dac for sound. You can run most versions of windows in a VM, also macos and linux.
moondev 2y ago
quickemu is great for this

_8j50 2y ago

I paid for it already lol. Should it not be "broadcom fusion" now? I am already getting emails about migrating my vmware account to broadcom.

senectus1 2y ago
>Should it not be "broadcom fusion" now? Given Broadcom's actions they need to rename it to "Broadcom fission" :-P
- _8j50 2y ago
  Good one!

berniedurfee 2y ago

Shoot. I saw Fusion and thought Autodesk. I’d forgotten that VMware was still a thing.

manishsharan 2y ago

Proxmox is completely free to download and deploy without any cost. For commercial and personal use.

ricktdotorg 2y ago
my longterm homelab of ESXi 6.x on Intel NUC with unlimited license hack recently blew up (repeated power surges, no UPS). went with Intel NUC again but proxmox instead for the rebuild and its been a dream so far. i don't miss ESXi or Vmware in general one bit.
- manishsharan 2y ago
  This is my setup: Nuc +Proxmox+ K3S. My goal is to set up a Kubernetes Cluster spanning 2 NUCs with K3S to build my playground for any application I decide to develop.

rekabis 2y ago

For this who use this product, a query: I have been using Hyper-V since the early days, and run it on both my development iron (Win11 23H2, heavily castrated) as well as my personal (non-commercial) Win2k22 21H2 Datacentre servers. Why should I choose VMware over Hyper-V? Genuinely curious.

raminf 2y ago

Started as a Fusion user, then Parallels on the Mac. Then back to Fusion. Each Windows or MacOS update would break something. Toggled back and forth maybe 5-6 times. Finally settled on Parallels and stopped upgrading Fusion. Haven't had problems since. Glad it's free now, but that sometimes means the company is going to stop investing in it.