VMware Makes Workstation and Fusion Free For Everyone (bleepingcomputer.com) 72
An anonymous reader quotes a report from BleepingComputer: VMware has announced that its VMware Fusion and VMware Workstation desktop hypervisors are now free to everyone for commercial, educational, and personal use. In May, the company also made VMware Workstation Pro and Fusion Pro free for personal use, allowing students and home users to set up virtualized test labs and experiment with other OSs by running virtual machines and Kubernetes clusters on Windows, Linux, and macOS devices. Starting this week, the Pro versions and the two products will no longer be available under a paid subscription model.
"Effective immediately, both VMware Fusion and VMware Workstation will transition away from the paid subscription model, meaning you can now utilize these tools without any cost. The paid versions of these offerings -- Workstation Pro and Fusion Pro -- are no longer available for purchase," said Broadcom product marketing director Himanshu Singh. "If you're currently under a commercial contract, you can rest easy knowing that your agreement will remain in effect until the end of your term. You will continue to receive the full level of service and enterprise-grade support as per your contract."
While the free versions will include all the features available in the paid products, Broadcom will no longer provide users with support ticketing for troubleshooting. Broadcom plans to continue developing new features and improvements and ensure that updates are rolled out promptly. "We're actively investing in new features, usability improvements, and other valuable enhancements," Singh added. "Our engineering teams are committed to maintaining our high standards for stability, with timely updates and reliable performance." You can download VMware Fusion and VMware Workstation here (sign-in required).
"Effective immediately, both VMware Fusion and VMware Workstation will transition away from the paid subscription model, meaning you can now utilize these tools without any cost. The paid versions of these offerings -- Workstation Pro and Fusion Pro -- are no longer available for purchase," said Broadcom product marketing director Himanshu Singh. "If you're currently under a commercial contract, you can rest easy knowing that your agreement will remain in effect until the end of your term. You will continue to receive the full level of service and enterprise-grade support as per your contract."
While the free versions will include all the features available in the paid products, Broadcom will no longer provide users with support ticketing for troubleshooting. Broadcom plans to continue developing new features and improvements and ensure that updates are rolled out promptly. "We're actively investing in new features, usability improvements, and other valuable enhancements," Singh added. "Our engineering teams are committed to maintaining our high standards for stability, with timely updates and reliable performance." You can download VMware Fusion and VMware Workstation here (sign-in required).
Good, now open source it. (Score:2)
Virtualbox is good, but the more the merrier. Don't switch to VMWare unless it's open sourced. Yeah I want things for free. You don't?
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VirtualBox used to be good on the Mac, but they basically gave up supporting it once they migrated to ARM processors. Disappointing.
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It was "ok" for some purposes, but anything that needed decent graphics acceleration (especially OpenGL 4+ stuff) was hosed.
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There aren't many ARM Desktop operating systems. Virtralization is not emulation...and there's a chance Apple won't let them use the x86 emulation layer.
I'd have made the same decision; they moved to a non-desktop platform. No reason to devote resources to something with no support.
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Well, I usually call it qemu or sometimes qemu-kvm when I want to make sure everybody understands what I am talking about. You can use qemu without kvm so no, they aren't the same thing.
it is, but it's not (Score:1)
The extensions (which are practically speaking, necessary) are NOT free for commercial use and what happens is, random engineers download Virtualbox because it's free, install the extensions because life sucks without them and no payment is needed up-front. Then Oracle uses telemetry to look for uses of the extensions by corporations and they come knocking like Shylock asking for their pound of flesh.
It really sucked that they started to make an ARM version but then they completely bailed on the project. I
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There is an ARM version: https://isapplesiliconready.co... [isapplesiliconready.com]
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I want things to work. If I pay a little, that's fine. But it needs to work. And it needs to work well. I use Linux and FreeBSD because they work well. OpenIndiana and Haiku are also free, but I don't use them, because they don't work well.
Re:Good, now open source it. (Score:5, Interesting)
VMware workstation works well if you have a supported kernel (or run it on a Windows host.)
What got me to stop using vmware even though it met my needs (and still would frankly) is that the OSS versions of their kernel modules are flaky, and they don't keep up with kernel releases, so you can only reasonably run it on old kernels. But modern kernels are necessary for security and performance reasons (if you want both at once, particularly) which is a show stopper in my book.
I was having problems with vmnet eventually just choking and not passing packets. Maybe those are fixed now, but I am now on libvirt and I can do everything that any version of vmware does that I care about.
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It was great for what I wanted to do, on MacOS, which was to run Windows and Linux. Windows for those silly apps that need to be used, outdated Win XP things, though I migrated away from some of that. But running Linux was great, on my local machine instead of an overloaded shared VM that took 5 minutes to log in to.
The big snag though was that you needed to reserve a LOT of space of storage, and even RAM, and it did not take long to run out of disk space if you used more than one VM, had snapshots, etc.
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Am I using something different? I use VMware workstation 17 (VMware workstation player) currently running on 6.11.3-zen1-1-zen, only one time I had to stay on a slightly older kernel version, but I think that's because the package was messed up. It builds modules for my latest kernels without issue.
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Perhaps it has improved since I stopped using it. They weren't keeping up with Debian last time I looked, let alone Ubuntu. I am running Devuan now, with "only" 6.10.11. I am not too eager to get precisely current until NTSYNC is functional.
I am now using libvirt and virt-manager. The only thing I miss is the graphics performance, but it rarely matters for anything I'm doing. The rest of the performance is excellent and it does the snapshots which I rarely use, migrations that I never use but might one day,
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Oof, it's bad when they can't even keep up with the breakneck speed of Debian! I run it on an Arch derivative so it's working fine with bleeding edge stuff. Hopefully next year I'll no longer need it and will completely remove it :)
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I don't and I think you are confused about what "free" means. However the short reason why I don't want so-called dollar-free software is TANSTAAFL and the long answer involves my mnemonic definition (as mutated for the character constraints of Slashdot):
#1 Freedom == (Meaningful + Truthful - Coercion^2) Choice{~5} != (Beer^4 | Speech | Trade)
(Can't recall any evidence of comprehension of the mnemonic on Slashdot, though I have referenced it occasionally when the topic of freedom comes up. FOSS is included
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For me, VMware was a budgeted item. Needs to be signed off by the boss and director and a justification is needed, go through It procedures, etc. It was my plan to use VMware though, except that WSL2 was good enough for 99% of my uses and I never got around to getting the license for it.
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Basically the ACK. I used VMware for a few years, but these days I'm using two other emulators.
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I liked the VMware fusion on MacOS, but the virtualbox felt like a clumsy alternative in comparison. Fusion had it's own problems (strange scripts to run to create shared drives, select from a menu but then run it by hand), but when it was working it felt smooth and straight forward. VMware support and online help wasn't great, because that was oriented around advanced pro versions. Virtualbox felt a bit shoestring, though it's been quite a while so I imagine Virtualbox has improved quite a lot (except o
Little late to the game here (Score:5, Interesting)
This might help the next generation of users, but Broadcom blowing up the VMware SME market with huge license fees has already done its damage.
Proxmox is free, uses KVM under the hood, and easily installed on commodity hardware. Gonna be hard winning back market share from that.
Re:Little late to the game here (Score:5, Insightful)
This. The hypervisor market is pretty much saturated. Even Microsoft has Hyper-V, and for those old enough to know the advantages, Xen is pretty f---ing effective with a regular Linux distribution as Dom0. (I don't recommend XenServer/XCPng, if you're thinking you need that, just use ProxMox instead, it's better supported, and those frontends don't actually take advantage of Xen's strengths.)
If even those options are "too hard", there's also VirtualBox. True, it's from Oracle, and that's a great reason not to use it, but it "just works" and the licensing isn't as awful as it once was.
I just don't see what VMware brings to the table beyond "Well, we've always used VMware" type familiarity.
(And I'm not saying that's not a reason, I'm sure many sysadmins are breathing a sigh of relief that they don't have to learn ProxMox or *shudder* XCPng after the licensing fiasco of the last few weeks. But I suspect this isn't enough to save VMware from irrelevance.)
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xcp-ng is a fine server platform. You might get hung up on Xen Orchestra, since the maintainers of xcp-ng do so to sell licenses to it, but XenCenter is still there and working as well as it ever did. Proxmox isn't without its problems. You can't use the enterprise repository, and if that doesn't matter to you, then neither will the feature/operation difference between XenServer, Proxmox, and ESXi.
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ProxMox is a better platform. XCP-ng might be better if it tried to take advantage of Xen's advantages, but the only paravirtualization mode it supports directly is the obsolete PV mode (and they may even have dropped that, I know they were planning to.)
If you're not going to support PVHs, why bother? KVM has far better support than Xen and is indistinguishable from Xen-with-HVMs in terms of performance. PVH has been around for more than five years, it's more performant than HVM, more efficient, is easie
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If you use XCP-ng, just use ProxMox, you'd be amazed at how much better it is and how much better supported. If you're using it because of Xen, ask yourself why?
I use Xen.
I do video re-encoding where the CPU is pegged 24/7.
On ProxMox, I couldn't figure out why, but the VM would constantly lock up after a few days of encoding.
And it would bring with other VM's with it (basically pihole) so the DNS lookups would stop, thus "no internet".
Xen has not crashed on me once...
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The issue with VirtualBox is that it performs really badly on many Windows installs, because Windows by default enabled Hyper-V for some security purposes. As such, VirtualBox can't use it, and performance is extremely poor.
Hyper-V has some major limitations, it's pretty basic. So right now there isn't really a good option for Windows.
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> If even those options are "too hard", there's also VirtualBox. True, it's from Oracle, and that's a great reason not to use it, but it "just works" and the licensing isn't as awful as it once was.
Maybe it's changed recently but last I looked if you wanted to use the Extension Pack, which has a lot of pretty useful functionality, you needed to buy a license, which as far as I could tell was basically impossible for a single user. I could only find ways to buy it in volume - I think it was 50 minimum. W
Re:Little late to the game here (Score:5, Informative)
Proxmox and VMWare Workstation are two different products that do different things. Proxmox/KVM is (among other things) a server virtualization platform, and VMWare Workstation is a client virtualization application.
Re:Little late to the game here (Score:5, Insightful)
>"Proxmox is free, uses KVM under the hood, and easily installed on commodity hardware."
Proxmox is not the same "market" as VMware desktop (the topic of this article); which is using the host for most work and guests as just addons. The same market for that would be things like Virtualbox or Parallels, etc.
But you are right that we all knew VMware was toast once Broadcom got involved. They can't monetize most of the products, so they will just give those away now. And being closed-source and with no sales, that means no support and no updates/investments. So the days of it being useful are numbered.
Back to the market YOU were talking about- complete virtualization on servers... yes, they are toast there as well. Drastically raising the prices on VMware ESXi/etc was a big mistake. It is driving customers right into the hands of XCP-ng/Xen Orchestra on the mid/high end and Proxmox on the mid/low end. Both can be free, both are open source, both are steadily improving.
There are still things ESXi can do that those can't, but not as many as most people think, and the gap is closing. If I had to guess, I would say at least 50% of their installs to maybe 80% of their installs could be replaced with XCP-ng.
https://xcp-ng.org/blog/2022/1... [xcp-ng.org]
You can even WARM MIGRATE from running ESXi guests directly to XCP-ng/XO now
https://www.virtualizationhowt... [virtualizationhowto.com]
Wrong byline (Score:2)
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There can be no sales pipeline for VMWare. If you or I "get hooked" on the desktop version, then there's a huge gaping void to jump over before we become worthy of customer-hood for the enterprise versions. Honestly, and I don't say this lightly, it's easier to go with Oracle than it is VMWare at this point.
But yes, Proxmox is a free and IMHO, safer alternative. It's no match for VMWare enterprise offerings, but it provides well for everything up to that point. If you're big you might do okay with OpenShift
Too little, too late. (Score:3, Interesting)
Too little, too late.
No one who doesn't absolutely need VMware will ever consider it again. This will prevent the student pipeline from dying entirely (like IBM allowed to happen with the iSeries), but no one "wants" VMware any more, and probably never will again.
ProxMox already has the features that maybe 90% of VMware users need, and I assume that they are flush with cash and hiring rapidly now.
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I think 2014 was the last time I "wanted" VM desktop software that wasn't virtualbox. I forgot vmware was even a thing on the desktop. Containers erased most of the need to run "linux" on your windows or mac machine, and you can spin up windows machines on aws etc and RDP into them now.
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If you're stuck in the VirtualBox loop and your main O/S is Linux, consider Proxmox. I moved from VB to PM and have never looked back. There are so many cool features in PM and its full-integration with Proxmox Backup (which does de-duplication by default) is a blessing. Plus it's so much faster than VB. And things scale up well with PM as well, such as failovers and things like that (which you probably wouldn't need if you're using it at home).
Re:Too little, too late. (Score:4, Informative)
Even if you want to run Linux on your Windows machine, wsl2 is built right in, and is about as seamless and low-setup an option as you can get. And for mac, there's already alternatives. UTM for free, Parallels for paid, etc.
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Yeah, I use WSL2 on Win10 to run Linux. Where VMware Workstation helps me is running Win10 on Linux at home. There probably are alternatives, but I've never looked for them as Workstation (formerly VM-Player) does what I need and it's easy to use.
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Yup, it does the job and does it well. My theory is that this is an underground movement of devs within Microsoft, because making useful software has never been one of Microsoft's corporate goals. It has some quirks, but it's getting better all the time.
Personally, life would be even simpler if I just ran a Linux box and then Windows was part that was emulated. (actually I've got one remote coworkers who's on a Linux box 99% of the time, who then grumbles once every other week when he has to turn on his
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This feels like a trap (Score:3)
Broadcom knows that they pissed off all of the small and medium sized businesses with their license fee increases, and many of them are jumping ship to other virtualization products like Hyper-V and Proxmox.
I guess that convincing developers and DevOps folks to keep making "free" VMWare VM's using these products is a good way to sabotage those migrations, by making more difficult to migrate those VM's to production.
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That's how I see it, this is bait, they got greedy, users balked, and now they're trying to (partially) walk back. If they instead charged a fix license fee, I'd consider it, but this is not free beer, this is free lock in with the aim of (eventually) reimposing a subscription fee. The fact it's only free for "non-commerial" says it all. One little screw up and your company is on the hook for breach of contract and retroactive licensing with penalties, which I'm certain was built into the make-it-free equat
no (Score:1)
This is non-commercial use only. They wanted to cut off support obligations for small-fry buyers because having a large support and sales organization is not really worth it. Their new business model is - squeeze large enterprises for everything they can for a few years until they make a profit on the purchase price of the company then dispose of the husk.
The virtualization software market is no longer growing and that meant VMWare had no future. To keep a company alive it has to grow at least a few percent
Unsolicited advice (Score:5, Insightful)
I use VMWare at home, because I used to support it professionally. I'll keep it until it breaks because it was free and I don't feel like replacing it.
Anybody who isn't in some way already invested and unable to escape would be a fool to get onboard with VMWare at this point. Don't start down a path with no future.
It's a trap! (Score:2)
Do not invest any time and energy into Broadcom products. They will just wait for a chance to screw you over. Instead go FOSS supervisors and you do not have to fear that.
Re: It's a trap! (Score:5, Funny)
Is having a FOSS supervisor like having RMS in your office chewing you out every few hours for installing a binary driver?
no thanks (Score:3)
VMWho? (Score:2)
They still have one thing over everyone else (Score:5, Interesting)
VMware has the best graphics drivers for Windows guests by far. Like it's not even a competition, nobody else is even playing the same sport. So if you wanted to run a game in a VM for some reason (like for example nothing else will play it) then VMware Workstation being free is a marvelous development.
I wouldn't use it for anything that mattered. But if they supported modern kernels, I would use it for playing some weird Windows games on Linux, like perhaps Wipeout XL which I've never got to work under anything. Probably just better to emulate a Playstation though, to be fair.
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GPU partitioning is still a work in progress. nvidia won't let you do it on consumer cards, AMD sucks, Intel is working on it but it's not easy to use.
IOW they all suck. I do wish they would get their acts together on this. But Wine gets better faster than the state of graphics drivers for virtualization.
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The problem is that most games you'd have to do this in use operating systems that won't run on newer processors without patching. I can't run Win95 on my Ryzen7 without patching.
Alternative download link (Score:5, Informative)
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Fishy/broken
1) The url contains (MS) "Windows"
2) If you click on Workstation Linux, it then provides a ".bundle" file, which appears to be some MacOS thing?
3) If you edit the URL to be Linux:
https://www.techspot.com/downl... [techspot.com]
then you still get the exact same page which gives that same ".bundle" thing.
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Fishy/broken
1) The url contains (MS) "Windows" 2) If you click on Workstation Linux, it then provides a ".bundle" file, which appears to be some MacOS thing? 3) If you edit the URL to be Linux: https://www.techspot.com/downl... [techspot.com] then you still get the exact same page which gives that same ".bundle" thing.
It's not fishy, you're just unfamiliar with it. A file with a .bundle extension is very much what VMware is released in for Linux. Extensions can be anything, but the file itself is just a shell script that extracts the installer payload from later in the file where it's stored as binary data.
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>"A file with a .bundle extension is very much what VMware is released in for Linux."
Oh! Thanks for that info. I have never seen it before and when I searched on it, all the results were for MacOS.
So it is essentially just a "shar"
It's dead Jim. (Score:5, Interesting)
Although I still use VMware workstation pro for OS testing and migration, and this lets me do it for free now, all of the things that VMware had to make this easy got killed over time.
VMWare converter, arguably the best way to move from physical to virtual or even lateral from another hypervisor in a pinch, is dead.
Esxi free, which is where you would dump that server to in a pinch, is dead.
Vsphere essentials, one of the cheapest ways to run VMWare with support, is all but dead.
So realistically this move is strictly to try to squeeze clients from Virtualbox or maybe some edge Hyper-V on workstation hosts, and they won't dare to move to your paid options because you priced yourself out of the market, or any market for that matter.
Let me make this simple for even Broadcom Investors to understand...
1) All of your free desktop users that are too lazy to switch will stay with workstation until you eventually drop support, and then go to Virtualbox.
2) All of your free server users with the potential of going paid are going to go with Proxmox, Nutanix Community Edition, Hyper-V or even Xen at this point
3) All of your current Paid users are going to go with Nutanix, Proxmox, Hyper-V or Xenserver as soon as their contract expires.
4) You are not even in consideration when it comes to a virtualization solution. Period. End of Story. The only people even entertaining of going VMware are customers that think they have a huge VMware investment that's too big to migrate and have more money than god, which means they will gladly write a blank check to any IT solution provider to migrate to one of your competitors the second they see your new billing structure and realize they can recoup the cost of migration in a year or two.
5) You Screwed the Golden Goose to the point that no one wants it, even if it cheap for them (See Dell). You probably couldn't even spin it off or sell VWware at this point you screwed it up so badly. Hell even Open sourcing it or full On GPLing it probably wouldn't save VMware at this point.
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VMware Converter got revived, as WAY too many people complained.
Here's a link to the current latest version (6.6.0). Broadcom does seem to be maintaining it and issuing new versions.
https://support.broadcom.com/g... [broadcom.com]
You'll need to create a free account with Broadcom to download it.
(This doesn't mean that Broadcom isn't a bunch of money-grabbing f*cktards who have likely screwed themselves over in the long term. Just that this is a very useful and free tool. You can always do P2Vs with this tool, then use
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Thanks for the heads up.
Now if they would bring back the free hypervisor and still sell a small business product that's not stupid priced that would be nice.
VMware is dead (Score:2)
So? (Score:3)
What good is this when you have to be a Broadcom "member" but there is absolutely nothing on the page leading to information on being one and obtaining an account, other than some "AI help" garbage?
If it bites... (Score:2)
....then purrs and requests belly rubs, then it had better damn well be a cat. Broadcom does not qualify.
Sorry, but my level of trust here is not merely low, it's a wholly imaginary number.
Not that it's been high since I tried a dual-core Broadcom MIPS64 board and discovered that it would do a hard reset if you tried to do any serious work with it.
This reminds me... (Score:1)
ANCIENT NEWS (Score:2)
Somebody only now realized this?
https://tech.slashdot.org/stor... [slashdot.org]
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As the summary [badly] stated, in May they made it free for PERSONAL use. Now they dropped the commericial subscriptions altogether (bet they didn't get many takers) and made it free for everyone.
make it land in debian ... (Score:1)
It would be nice if it was actually available. (Score:2)