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VMware Giving Away Workstation Pro, Fusion Pro Free For Personal Use (theregister.com) 90

Posted by BeauHD from the buying-your-affection dept.
Dan Robinson reports via The Register: VMware has made another small but notable post-merger concession to users: the Workstation Pro and Fusion Pro desktop hypervisor products will now be free for personal use. The cloud and virtualization biz, now a Broadcom subsidiary, has announced that its Pro apps will be available under two license models: a "Free Personal Use" or a "Paid Commercial Use" subscription for organizations. Workstation Pro is available for PC users running Windows or Linux, while Fusion Pro is available for Mac systems with either Intel CPUs or Apple's own processors. The two products allow users to create a virtual machine on their local computer for the purpose of running a different operating system or creating a sandbox in which to run certain software. [...]

According to VMware, users will get to decide for themselves if their use case calls for a commercial subscription. There are no functional differences between the two versions, the company states, and the only visual difference is that the free version displays the text: "This product is licensed for personal use only." "This means that everyday users who want a virtual lab on their Mac, Windows, or Linux computer can do so for free simply by registering and downloading the bits from the new download portal located at support.broadcom.com," VMware says. Customers that require a paid commercial subscription must purchase through an authorized Broadcom Advantage partner.

The move also means that VMware's Workstation Player and Fusion Player products are effectively redundant as the Pro products now serve the same role, and so those will no longer be offered for purchase. Organizations with commercial licenses for Fusion Player 13 or Workstation Player 17 can continue to use these, however, and they will continue to be supported for existing end of life (EOL) and end of general support (EoGS) dates.
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VMware Giving Away Workstation Pro, Fusion Pro Free For Personal Use More

VMware Giving Away Workstation Pro, Fusion Pro Free For Personal Use

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  • Well, since they can't sell it... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 14, 2024 @05:52PM (#64472387)

    But just as I didn't need it before, I don't need it now.

  • I'm giving away a flaming bag of poo. Would you like it?

  • KVM (Score:5, Informative)

    by crow ( 16139 ) on Tuesday May 14, 2024 @06:00PM (#64472425) Homepage Journal

    At one point, you could get VMWare Workstation free for personal use, which was great. But these days, you can use KVM or VirtualBox for free, so this isn't going to be all that exciting for most people. Where this will be great is for people who use VMWare at work, and now can use it at home for free.

    For Linux users, VMWare was always lagging behind in support for new kernels and libraries, so KVM has been a more stable choice.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by whoever57 ( 658626 )

      Since one can migrate a VMWare VM to KVM, why use VMWare on Linux?

      • Re:KVM (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Tailhook ( 98486 ) on Tuesday May 14, 2024 @06:24PM (#64472469)

        Since one can migrate a VMWare VM to KVM, why use VMWare on Linux?

        There aren't really many good reasons to use VMWare on Linux any longer. There used to be: VMWare, at one time, was far easier to deal with. Today, the KVM/QEMU stack is pretty friendly. It still isn't as polished as VMWare's nice UI, etc., but it's entirely tolerable, and much, much lighter weight. Where things get interesting is around sophisticated stuff like live migration, PCI passthrough, GPUs, etc. In some areas KVM is ahead of VMWare, in others VMWare is superior.

        Mainly, the appeal of VMWare is inertia. A lot of people have been using it for a very long time now, and they haven't (until the recent license changes) had a reason to look elsewhere.

        • Re: KVM (Score:5, Interesting)

          by drinkypoo ( 153816 ) <drink@hyperlogos.org> on Tuesday May 14, 2024 @07:01PM (#64472513) Homepage Journal

          There is one good reason to use VMware on Linux to run Windows, 3D graphics support. KVM/QEMU doesn't do this for Windows clients on Linux hosts. Supposedly there is something coming which might help with that, but until then...

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Tailhook ( 98486 )

            You can do with this well with GPU passthrough. That used to be pretty tricky, but today, given the right hardware, it's entirely feasible.

            • Yes, if you are willing to devote your whole display or add a second card. But I am using a horizontal case to avoid the whole cracking the PCIE slot problem of modern, heavy GPUs, and adding another GPU would interfere with my airflow.

              I used to do some gaming on vmware player, like SimCity 4. That game in particular ran like trash on the earliest versions I tried it on (I forget which) and then over the next couple it got to be quite good actually. Now that game runs fine in Proton-GE, or at least as well

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by Tailhook ( 98486 )

                I agree, it's not feasible for everyone. It is, however, extremely efficient. Gaming in a Windows guest is within a couple percent of bare metal. It's possible to have the best of everything in one machine. And I think that's pretty great.

              • Yes, if you are willing to devote your whole display or add a second card.

                Why wouldn't they be? 100% of the non-tablet devices in my house have two GPUs. All our laptops have iGPUs + real GPUs. All of our desktops have iGPUs + real GPUs, even thought I didn't want them they just exist anyway on the silicon. And the iGPU is more than capable of running the host OS for the odd scenario where you need to run a 3D application in a VM of a different OS.

                • My CPU doesn't have a GPU on it.

                  I could buy one that did, but I can EITHER get that or one with a shedload of cache, there's not one CPU that has both.

                  If I'm going to upgrade my processor, I'm going to go for the cache, because that's going to most affect the performance of the software I want to run.

                  Luckily I don't really care about running Windows any more. Most of the games I want to run actually work much better in Proton-GE than they do on modern Windows, and I don't want to use old versions of Windows

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

            Graphics performance of VirtualBox on a Windows host with Ubuntu guest is still terrible. It's weird because VirtualBox gets regularly updated, but it's still basically broken for desktop Linux use.

            The other big advantage that VMWare used to have was USB support, but it seems that they have fixed that in VirtualBox.

            • Graphics performance of VirtualBox on a Windows host with Ubuntu guest is still terrible

              We were discussing Windows guests on Linux hosts, which, under Virtualbox was able to play Youtube and other videos very well some 12-15 years ago.

              Virtualbox has always had USB support on Linux hosts -- but it wasn't open source, so you had to download and install the USB add-on separately.

              • We were discussing Windows guests on Linux hosts, which, under Virtualbox was able to play Youtube and other videos very well some 12-15 years ago.

                We were discussing 3d graphics for Windows guests on Linux hosts, which under Virtualbox was always bad and is still bad.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by mjwx ( 966435 )

          Mainly, the appeal of VMWare is inertia. A lot of people have been using it for a very long time now, and they haven't (until the recent license changes) had a reason to look elsewhere.

          The appeal in VMWare comes in the management suite. KVM/QEMU may be fine for a small operation, but wake me when you're managing 1000's of hosts across multiple datacentres in several countries with five nines of uptime expected. The management suite used to be the only thing from VMWare worth buying and it was so successful that at one point they gave ESXi away for free.

          Also, formerly the support but this was going seriously downhill before Broadcom and I doubt they're going to improve things.

    • Unfortunately, I found VirtualBox unreliable for running HomeAssistant. Not sure what the problem was, but the database constantly corrupted. All problems went away when I switched to VMWare workstation player. It will be a welcome change to be able to use more than one VM with the Pro version.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Did you have host-based caching enabled for your virtual disk controller? While faster, that can be dangerous if your VM or host crash or lose power. Turn if off after installing your OS if you aren't just experimenting.

        Also, what filesystem did you use inside your VM?

  • enough said

    • too little too late (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      How old does a person need two bee before they understand the difference between "to", "too", and "two"? This annoying deficiency comes in just slightly behind the people that can't tell the difference between "there", "their", and "they're". Its sow annoying.

      • First ballet dancer: "I have a tutu."
        Second ballet dancer: "I have two tutus."
        Third ballet dancer: "I have two tutus too!"

      • For me, it's a lot more annoying to see them misuse the its-it's (which you did in your comment). For some unfathomable reason, most people these days have no clue about English grammar. Forget the their-they're.. What about Instagram telling me "blah blah WHO you might know" - if even a multibillion dollar company cannot use "whom" properly, I think we are doomed

  • A trifle odd... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by fuzzyfuzzyfungus ( 1223518 ) on Tuesday May 14, 2024 @06:11PM (#64472449) Journal
    It seems more than a trifle odd to see this move at the same time they are getting rid of the free tier of ESXi.

    Broadcom's interest is in the big customers who are locked in enough to support juicy margins, sure; but the crippled version of ESXi was not a meaningful substitute for the VMware stuff that those customers depend on; and (unlike workstation) it could draw directly on the engineering effort that they needed to expend anyway to keep ESX up to date to support the customers they really cared about and its existence helped provide a supply of IT people who were at least reasonably familiar with small ESX environments.

    Workstation seems like it falls in a similar bucket in terms of being no serious threat to the high margin product lines, but providing a general warm fuzzy feeling of familiarity; but seems like it would involve more work to maintain(things like the guest OS components are reused; and I assume that things like the emulated peripherals are shared with ESX; but it's considerably more distinct software than just ESX with low core count and memory limits baked in).

    Makes me wonder if it will even survive; or if this is just what them squeezing some goodwill out of however much time their obligations to people with fancy support contracts require them to keep it alive.

    • It seems more than a trifle odd to see this move at the same time they are getting rid of the free tier of ESXi.

      I liked ESXi and would like to keep using it. I had a very nice ESXi server setup years ago that got taken out by a power surge and have been going back and forth some on if I need to replace it. Just as I was about to dive in on rebuilding this system I hear ESXi is no more. What is there to replace it?

      I had a multi-head system like this: https://www.pugetsystems.com/l... [pugetsystems.com]

      The system wasn't for gaming but to test out software developed for multiple platforms. I did some gaming but mostly it was about ke

  • They threw their cash on a bonfire. And everything the exec's did made it die faster.

  • ... the other Type 2 hypervisor which has always been free

    • Re:Just keeping up with VirtualBox (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Dwedit ( 232252 ) on Tuesday May 14, 2024 @10:52PM (#64472883) Homepage

      Unless you ever downloaded the extension pack, then they will attempt to charge your employer tons of money.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        I was happily surprised to see in VirtualBox 7 that the extension pack is no longer necessary for USB 3.0 support. Since then the list of features in the extension pack is significantly less interesting:

        VRDP, host shared webcam passthrough, disk image encryption, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure integration, NVMe and PXE boot
        https://www.virtualbox.org/man... [virtualbox.org]

  • VmWare is dead, do not fall into that trap.

    • I would say it dead to personal to medium-small size businesses. I have been running ESXI as a home lab for years. With their recent nInn-you just recently, I am going to need to move to Proxmox or something else. Yes, they did not make money off me, but I would have recommend it customers, but not now.

  • NOT a concession (Score:3)

    by bloodhawk ( 813939 ) on Tuesday May 14, 2024 @08:08PM (#64472623)
    This isn't a concession, this is like a drug dealer hanging around schools providing free hits. The hope is to milk the cash cow for all its worth before it is finally dead.

    • It may be expired milk, too. Who knows how much support will go into a free product. I certainly don't expect any new features. Still nice to have today

    • Going from a a couple VMs on a MacBook Air to a full VMWare deployment with vSAN, NSX, fault tolerance, and the other high-zoot VMWare features is a pretty big step. I'd expect more people to go from Hyper-V running on their Windows machine to slinging that in the data center.

      If Broadcom really wanted to keep VMware going, this helps, but also making cool features of VMWare accessible to smaller businesses. For example, Horizon, vSAN, NSX are things that would be quite useful to coax businesses to that pl

    • Somehow I don't see myself getting addicted to a VM. Comparing free for personal use commercial software to drug dealers is quite silly. Unless your drug dealer only gives you drugs if you solve math problems and provides you free math tutoring.

      The concept of personal use of products to allow users to familiarise (educate) themselves with it is quite standard. Ultimately it widens the pool of people familiar with it. But if you wake up in the morning shivering and scratching your skin because you haven't sp

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by chrish ( 4714 )

      I was thinking it's more like a cat offering to let you pet its belly...

  • I'm using Windows, OEM without any additional license available. (I could also replace that OS with Linux, if that helps.) So one license, and not the best kind of license.

    I'd like to occasionally run Windows in a VM to use applications that are useful but untrustworthy, such as software by Chinese companies known not to respect privacy, or freeware that's required for some arcane procedure that has instructions but no support.

    Would any of these solutions let me run Windows in a VM without a standalone lice

    • You can run Windows for the things you mentioned, without Activating a license. Just use it without Activation.

      I'm guessing you are running Windows 10 or Windows 11, where you can enable Hyper-V and you wouldn't need VMWare. As you noted, your vm's are licensed separately in any case.

    • Here's what I've done before when I was in your situation:

      1, I bought a PC box with an OEM Windows license preinstalled.
      2, Then I used DD to create a perfect image of the disk with Windows installed on it.
      3, Then I create a VM from the disk image, (probably using DD again), and tested it to satisfaction. Possibly using what is now free for personal use VMware Workstation for Windows.
      4, Then I formatted the original hard disk and installed a nice Ubuntu desktop.
      5, Then I installed VMware Workstation for Linu

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by piojo ( 995934 )

        Thanks, it's good to know (if surprising) that works. I thought OEM windows would detect mismatched hardware when run in a VM, but perhaps the VM creators have gotten better at letting emulated devices keep the same IDs as the real ones.

        • The trick is using DD correctly. You're cloning a complete image of the disk, boot sector, warts, and all. A perfect digital copy is a perfect digital copy. Windows will recognize some different drivers, but installing VMware tools work well to finalize the process.

          I'm not advocating for a long term VMware relationship because Broadcom is competing with Oracle to be Most Evil Corp. I do have a long history with the tools, including free ESXi and I haven't yet migrated to something else, (other than DDEV [ddev.com] whi

          • Re: (Score:3)

            by Temkin ( 112574 )

            Broadcom is competing with Oracle to be Most Evil Corp.

            Broadcom has a ways to go there. I'm waiting for the "OMG you screwed up our VMWare acquisition!" firing. If it doesn't happen, then yes they're making a play for the title. But don't underestimate the dark lord. He may just be sleeping.

            Amusingly... When Oracle acquired Sun, they forced all the (*cough* remaining) Sun employee's to switch to corporate standard Windows laptops. This was back in the Windows 7 days, where locking down a user's laptop was still kind of problematic. Understand, it was forced

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by Anonymous Coward

          My PC came licensed with Windows 10, I imaged the disk, then blew Windows away and installed Linux bare metal. Windows 10, still licensed, worked fine using QEMU/KVM and the disk image converted to qcow2 format. Later, I even "upgraded" it to Windows 11 using the official MS updates method with no hacks, after getting the VM to emulate TPM 2.0 and a suitable processor (which the actual hardware doesn't have). The emulated devices in the VM are mostly very different to the actual hardware, Windows doesn't se

          • That reminds me, once I had a new computer with OEM Windows installed. The moment the computer started up, it asks for a username and password, then it actually installs Windows on the machine, from a special OEM Windows installer on one of the partitions.

            I knew this, so before I ever powered on the PC I used DD to image the disk and then virtualized that, and saved it as a VMware snapshot. That came in handy later for cloning clean, disposable Windows VMs upon demand.

            Whenever I saw old Windows machines rep

    • I highly recommend you turn on Hyper-V if you use Windows. Info is linked here here [microsoft.com].

      Microsoft has free templates for creating Ubuntu and Windows virtual machines without a license issue and you can add your own. Hyper-V is a real bare metal type 1 hypervisor unlike virtualbox and vmware workstation which requires abunch of tools to emulate hardware.

      If you have the Home OEM edition you will need to run some hacks. Personally it is worth the $79 to turn home into pro oem for Hyper-v and Remote Desktop.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by piojo ( 995934 )

        If you have the Home OEM edition you will need to run some hacks. Personally it is worth the $79 to turn home into pro oem for Hyper-v and Remote Desktop.

        I think it's not worth it for me, since I find Windows to be a mix of competent, buggy, and intentionally annoying. Windows 11 is better than Windows 10, but it also leaves me with more of a "fuck you" impression. Switching to Linux is always in the back of my mind, but I haven't gone for that option yet.

  • Subscription companies are just spinning the dials on us. Paid Tier -> Paid Tier with Ads -> Free Tier with Ads -> Free Desktop Tier -> Paid Mobile Version -> Free Updates -> Paid Skins -> Free Pro Version -> Paid Free Version -> Free cross-compatibility -> Free backward compatibility -> Paid forward compatibility -> Fully paid temporary license -> Free part time pro license -> Temporary full-time partly ad supported pro license for workstations in subterranean bas

  • They've got nothing overly compelling, and only a fool would hitch their wagon to Broadcom after all this time.

    Anyone who eventually get burned by this ( and you will, if you're stupid enough to do it ) deserve whatever you get.

  • From https://www.vmware.com/content... [vmware.com] web page:

    https://store-us.vmware.com/fu... [vmware.com] and https://store-us.vmware.com/wo... [vmware.com] show "
    VMware Store
    Down for Maintenance

    As part of the transition to Broadcom systems, the store will be moving to a new domain. As a result, store will be shutdown starting 30 Apr 2024.

    To be notified when store is back and operational, enter email here.

    For more information, see KB article 319284.

    Thank you for your patience.

    We apologize for any inconvenience." Its links are broken! :(

    • No worries! All you need is a paid Broadcom subscription for your enterprise and you can download the free* version of Workstation Pro!

      *Free as in no money required, (technically, for the Pro version, on top of the buckets you paid for the enterprise subscription) please deposit one soul into your authenticator app to continue.

  • Broadcom touched it. You will get cooties if you touch it now.

  • I am on Windows most of the time, and there I use WSL 2 for anything Linux. It is nice and stable.
    I am running Windows (company installs, autopilot testing etc) within VirtualBox. Not as polished at VMware, but good enough, and free.

    My home setup has a Proxmox (QEMU?) running things like Home Assistant in a VM, a VPN gateway as LXC, move MQTT and z2m out as LXC containers, running Frigate for video etc.

    • If you have local admin rights on your company machine I will say Hyper-V is available and far supperior more in line with qemu as a bare metal hypervisor if you have rights to turn it on with Windows. Ubuntu templates are even included to create a guest with a few mouse clicks

  • Good luck FINDING a copy or a license key.
    It's a circular voyage that pops up new sites, new tabs, warnings, news, blogs, and....nothing.

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