A Tribute to VMware Workstation, Fusion, and Hosted UI | Hacker News Reader

A Tribute to VMware Workstation, Fusion, and Hosted UI

blog.chipx86.com

124 pointsjwise077 comments

VMWare just shot itself in the head.

Maybe Google or Apple or Facebook or other software company can hire the team before all of them get jobs in very different companies.

Not for the team itself, those great developers will find jobs without issue.

But for the company hiring them, a well oiled team is worth a lot more than the sum of each of the individual developers on their own.

Yeah, Workstation is a huge reason why we were willing to shell out for ESXi, because it's such a well-written piece of software. If that product goes to crap, count on not getting any more of my money.

VMWare is running scared of Hyper-V, which is good enough now for most use cases and comes free with a Windows server license. For Windows shops, SMB's, etc this is a no-brainer.

On the cloud front, no one uses their expensive product. You'd use KVM, Xen, Proxmox, etc that you had the source for and could modify. If you're running linux you might as well run a linux hypervisor.

I suspect these layoffs were rational moves for a changing industry. We're testing Hyper-V at work to get away from VMware licensing, which is fairly stiff, for the few thing that aren't on the cloud/VPS. The industry is changing again and the room for big VMware shops is smaller than it was just a few years ago. There's way too much economic sense to move to cloud providers instead of hosting your own.

As a VMware employee from 2007 to (January) 2014 the only time I recall any fear from leadership or product teams about HyperV was in 2008 or so when it was about to come out and then for a little while after it first came out. We knew we had a several year lead over Microsoft and wanted to make sure we stayed ahead of them feature-wise. After 2009 I don't even recall people bringing up Microsoft or HyperV in conversation; we were more focused on competing with cloud platforms.

If you have such a good team, which arguably developed many features that also ended up being part of the VMWare Server product, and in fact bootstrapped the company itself, then you pivot your product and keep the team, not the other way around.

Or I may be wrong and established companies should play by different rules than startups regarding their more productive teams, because it's more cost effective.

Yeah but the team was in charge of consumer solutions (Workstation and Fusion), not datacenter solutions (vSphere, etc)

Since Windows 8, Windows now ships with client Hyper-V. I imagine this is affecting sales as well.

Not to mention, slowing revenues on the server front means they can't subsidize the cheaper or even free client solutions anymore.

Workstation and Fusion have never been free, and not even "cheap".

The problem is that really-free alternatives are now good enough for most uses: VirtualBox is the go-to choice for Linux and OSX and is fairly solid, while Hyper-V now ships with Windows and is overall quite good.

VmWare have also run out of mainstream features to add, so it got harder and harder to solicit paid upgrades for what is basically an old-school shrinkwrap.

What they will likely do is freeze the codebase and turn it in a mini-SaaS where you don't get Tools updates and new OS support unless you pay a yearly sub. In practice that's already the case, they will just make it more locked down. You don't need talent for that sort of thing.

Hyper-V also ships these days on client Windowses too. I personally was quite pleased that I didn't need to install third party virtualization solution anymore on my workstation.

How is the graphics performance on Linux and Windows guest VMs?

Pretty poor, right now, unfortunately. I was looking at replacing VMWare Workstation with Hyper-V. However, when I installed Ubuntu Desktop on a brand new Hyper-V VM, I had to do some grub hacking to pass kernel parameters to get the display resolution right. Even after I got the display resolution right, there was a noticeable lag in the GUI refresh. I know that maybe with some more hacking I could have gotten everything to work just as well as it does on VMWare Workstation, but that proves my point. In VMWare, everything Just Works, out of the box. In Hyper-V, you need to tweak things to to work, and it's not clear what all things you need to tweak.

Allegedly that will be improving with Windows Server 2016, which is supposed to have better support for GPU acceleration for VM guests, but I'm waiting to see what actually gets delivered before I get excited.

This is a real pity: VMWare Fusion is AFAIK the only stable desktop virtualisation app for OS X.

It's competitor, VirtualBox has the honour of being the only piece of software that 'taints' the Linux kernel, not because it's proprietary (VirtualBox is OSS) but because it's that poor quality that the Linux kernel maintainers don't want to support it.

This is really a shame. I am really hoping Veertu[1] will be a thing, because the idea seems to be really nice: providing a good UI for OS X's hypervisor framework.

[1] http://veertu.com/

I installed Veertu it and gave it a try. I'm mostly interested in hosting FreeBSD clients, so I was happy to see a FreeBSD net install disk image in its list of options, but the client kernel panics as it boots. Fusion supports FreeBSD (and any other OS I've thrown at it in recent memory) flawlessly… Guess I'll stick with it for now.

Does it have it's own format for images, or does it support VMX / VMDK ?

I'm sick at the thought of having to deal with Yet Another VM Format.

I had a FreeBSD VMDK, but I couldn't figure out how to get Veertu to open it, so if Veertu does support it, it's not obvious how.

I had no idea osx had a hypervisor framework. It showed up in 10.10!

https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/releasenotes/MacOSX/...

It does :). There is also an ecosystem developing around it, e.g. the xhyve tool:

https://github.com/mist64/xhyve

CoreOS on xhyve:

https://github.com/coreos/coreos-xhyve

Parallels runs on a Mac. You have to pay continuously for upgrades, but it's there.

And good luck if you re-install more than five times (on the same hardware, no less). "Too many activations. You must purchase another license." I called, they 'reset the counter', giving me five more activations. Called. "I see we've already reset the activation counter..." "Yes?" "Hmm..."

Never mind - I'll buy Fusion.

Parallels is riddled with advertising.

FWIW, I think they've gotten better in the last release or two.

My sincere hope, if Fusion is going to go away, is that Parallels will have an influx of customers and not be forced into doing silly advertising/bundling things to maintain their revenue.

I have always preferred Parallels and every time I evaluate the two, Parallels integrates better and performs better.

Like for other products? I've never seen an ad in parallels and have been using it since it first came out.

In my experience (I left Mac over a year ago, so it may be out of date), Parallels has always felt a little faster than Fusion on Mac when running Windows, especially if you were running games.

I've not had any problems running VirtualBox on Linux. Is it worse on Mac or is VMWare better is some way?

The reasons I use VMWare Fusion are:

1. VirtualBox shared folders performance is terrible.

2. VMWare Fusion is the only shared folders implementation I've found (tried Parallels, VirtualBox, and VMWare Fusion) that can follow symbolic links, making them look like normal files/directories on the guest (useful for Windows guests which don't understand nix symlinks).

3. IIS can't host applications off of VirtualBox shared folders for some permissions reason, which cannot be fixed.

I really hope VMWare Fusion doesn't die, as it's the only product I've found that supports my use case.

Can't stress enough point #1. I've seen a HUGE performance difference between VB and Fusion with actual web-development workload. Enough to justify moving from a free solution to a paid one. Plus you get other nice features, eg. open a file on Mac OSX with a program installed in a Windows VM.

When they discontinued VMware Server 2, I migrated over a dozen machines over to VirtualBox on CentOS. We have had no issues with performance or stability with any of our machines. VirtualBox 5.0 brought feature parity to VMware Server for our needs. The only thing we have found lacking are more remote management features.

Parallels is awesome, and stable.

This is a shame. I had recently migrated to VMWare Workstation (from VirtualBox) because they have far superior OpenGL support (OpenGL 3.3, and 4.x is coming in near-future Linux kernel releases).

VirtualBox on the other hand is stuck in prehistoric OpenGL 2.1 (no programmable shaders), and most features are pure software emulation.

This may seem silly, OpenGL in a virtual machine, but I do some light OpenGL based graphics in my spare time, and it's pretty convenient to test if code works on a different platform without rebooting. I also have a Windows only machine where I use VMWare to develop on Linux (because developing on Windows is really uncomfortable when you're used to command line tools and the Linux eco system).

I hope these products find a new home. If they were truly made by such a small team, perhaps a smaller company could buy the rights and code and continue their development?

OpenGL 2.1 has programmable shaders. GLSL shaders were moved to core in OpenGL 2.0 version. See here: https://www.opengl.org/wiki/History_of_OpenGL#OpenGL_2.0_.28...

Great description of what a tight-knit, motivated team can accomplish.

This seems a strategic exit by VMWare to cede all desktop-hosted virtualization markets to competitors. Probably because that category didn't meet an arbitrary profitability criteria, instead of a customer-focused analysis of what value propositions the product line brought to the table when looked at as a part of an entire picture of all other products offered.

Another possibility is VMWare might be defocusing their traditional virtualization and this is the first of an all-in shift to containers because that's a growth market at the moment.

Not a few enterprise customers value these "low profitability" product lines, because they promise to lower the complexity of dealing with a wide-area problem space. After IBM ditched their "low-profit" servers, for example, you can find a CIO going on record here and there saying they abandoned their all-IBM-servers policy in their shops. I can assure you there are many more who did not go on record.

Applying a single financial metric across all your products loses focus upon what really matters to your customers. It looks great to boost relative margins, though. By jettisoning certain product lines that complemented and completed a market message to your customers, you open up high-margin products to much more effective competitive attacks. It will be interesting to see what VMWare's competitors come up with.

> Another possibility is VMWare might be defocusing their traditional virtualization and this is the first of an all-in shift to containers because that's a growth market at the moment.

Supporting container workloads doesn't need to come at the expense of "traditional" virtualization, e.g. see the work being done with vSphere Integrated Containers[1] or AppCatalyst[2], particularly since most (all?) containers ran on cloud providers are running in a VM.

N.B. I work at VMware, but as an engineer in a completely unrelated BU I have absolutely no insight into Workstation/Fusion strategy

[1] http://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2015/10/vsphere-integrated-c...

[2] http://getappcatalyst.com/

> Supporting container workloads doesn't need to come at the expense of "traditional" virtualization...

Absolutely agree with you, I think machine and container virtualization should co-exist in a sophisticated ecosystem and it isn't an either-or. Just as server- and desktop-hosted virtualization should co-exist on another axis of the ecosystem.

I lack insight into why VMWare effectively gave up on holding down the desktop end of the spectrum, which essentially tells customers that the capability to scale from desktops to servers is no longer as important to its mission or business model. Perhaps native desktop OS support for virtualization is shaping up much faster and more robustly than we realize, VMWare execs see the writing on the wall and decided to exit the space on a high note instead of fighting future ever-declining revenues in that space, and they will count upon lower-margin solutions based upon native desktop OS virtualization features to address the desktop-to-server scaling issue.

Is is likely that Hyper-V in Windows 10 or the OS X hypervisor framework will evolve into replacements for Workstation/Fusion?

That would suck. VMWare Fusion/Workstation/Player mean I can run the exact same VM on a Mac, Windows and Linux without any modification.

Having to use VirtualBox over here (which I've had problems with before) and KVM over there and Hyper-V over there and whatever shows up on OS X yet again would be such a pain in the ass.

"This seems a strategic exit by VMWare to cede all desktop-hosted virtualization markets to competitors."

It's more boring than that. They've decided to offshore the jobs. The management probably believes these products are at market saturation anyway, so beyond attrition to container-oriented solutions like Docker, it's not likely Fusion or Workstation will actually go away or feel that different.

What's disappointing is that this team could have been everything Docker or Vagrant is - repeatable environments and workflow for developers.

There is zero chance the offshore team has the built-up institutional knowledge the original HostedUI team painstakingly accreted over decades to quickly integrate seamless container virtualization into the desktop-hosted Workstation and Fusion products. Not a knock on the offshore team. Even a brand-new domestic team would have zero chance. The container virtualization market is moving fast, so quick, effective integration is required.

That's unfortunate. I was looking forward to something like a VMWare Fusion/Workstation-powered session that starts off with a virtualized OS, auto-generates a container configuration file by watching everything you install and detecting what the installed app uses while you run it through its paces, creates and deploys a containerized app, perhaps onto your laptop and perhaps injecting directly into a cloud instance you point to (bonus points for integrated account support and API hooks for customizing the cloud deployment flow or injecting into your Chef/Puppet/etc. infrastructure)...then does it in reverse as well. Or "sync" a container to a virtualized OS version of the app, where you can deploy the full panoply of debugging tools to inspect what is happening on the container in ways that would be terribly inconvenient or not even possible on the container, like using log file analysis tools that wouldn't be on the container. It would take a performance hit, but for some the trade-off might be worth it. Or create an "instrumented" container, that intercepts failed operations like a library missing from the container, which then starts a sync with a virtualized OS version presumably with the missing library that completes the call. The possibilities I saw were endless.

I've used both VMware Workstation and Fusion (paying for both out of my own pocket) on and off for years, as I've went back and forth between OS X and Linux on my primary workstation.

Just recently I bought a new MacBook Pro and was debating between Fusion and Parallels. I recalled all the annoying ads in Parallels that really frustrated me (since it was a paid-for product, nothing something free and ad-supported) and so I purchased a new license for Fusion 8 Pro.

I suppose I'll consider myself lucky if it's still getting updates a year from now.

I've also been debating another decision recently -- whether to stick with VMware ESXi for our infrastructure or to move things over to KVM. I think that decision has now been made.

You won't get updates at the end of that year-long period. You'll get a prompt to upgrade to the newest version. Now that is up in the air if there will be a new version.

try veertu.com

Let's see... I can't run FreeBSD or OpenBSD and I can't create any VMs myself? I can only run -- untrusted, by the way -- VMs that I download from some web site?

Yeah, no thanks.

VMWare Workstation was one of the greatest products of all time (in the early 2000s). It made it possible for me to get a lot more work done on a single computer. At some point, VMWare the company shifted to enterprise VMs, absurdly overpriced, and VirtualBox could do everything VMWare could. But for several years in the early 2000s, Workstation was a truly great product.

VirtualBox still can't do everything VMWare can.

External USB devices behave very differently between both products.

It's certainly no longer clear that VMware is hands-down superior to VirtualBox for desktop virtualization. I maintain a library of VM images and most of my users have been going with VirtualBox in the last couple of years because it's so much easier to get your hands on and it has worked out-of-the-box more reliably on a variety of systems in the last few years, and also the ability to have network port forwarding configured by an appliance rather than solely on the host. VMware seems to be the platform of choice in large enterprises where you can easily get a license or already have the infrastructure in place. For more casual desktop users, I really don't see it in use anymore.

Fair enough; I haven't used that feature (like OpenGL, it's something I use "Real Hardware" for).

This is a great tribute to a wonderful team. Even after all these years I'm still using Fusion despite having left VMware three years ago after over a decade long stint.

As I understand it they're just off-shoring development to China. VMware already has a development team in Beijing, so they're consolidating development there instead. Never mind that it's just as expensive to build a product there, and that the brain trust with all the institutional knowledge is in Palo Alto.

Is the off-shoring for all products or just Workstation?

Just the hosted (Workstation/Fusion) team as I understand it, although I've heard there are also big cuts to vCloud Air.

VMWare was my first real life encounter with virtualisation

I remember (back in early-mid 2000 I think, my memory is a bit hazy) installing VMWare on a couple of company training lab machines.

One machine ran Windows, the other Redhat Linux. I installed VMWare on both. On the RedHat machine I brought up a VM running Windows (2000 I think), on the Windows machine I brought up a VM running RedHat.

Suffice to say my jaw dropped with amazement (yes, I know, but simple things at all that). I then got on the phone yelling for my colleagues to get over to the lab pronto because I had something amazing to to show them, and jibbering on about "Windows is running inside Linux!!".

So thank you VMWare Workstation folks for brightening up an otherwise dull day :)

My memories go back to 2000 as well, running it on a Pentium III laptop.

Back then, I used it for running multiple versions of Windows so I could test web apps on different versions of IE (4 and 5, I think), when IE was still the dominant browser.

It was such a game changer at the time.

I do like Fusion, it beats VirtualBox, which I've used for years. I've been considering switching to Linux and using KVM to host my VMs instead. Virt-manager is an amazing frontend, and being able to modify my VM by editing a few command line switches is the bee's knees

I assume these layoffs are related to the acquisition of EMC? http://techcrunch.com/2016/01/26/vmware-confirms-layoffs-in-...

I know it's not the new hotness (Wikipedia has Workstation released in 1999), but as a product I was always pretty impressed with it. It felt like a mutant from a time when developers said "No, we're going to fix bugs and spend time on our core functionality" instead of adding another feature. To hear it was done with a team of around 20 during its lifetime? Impressive! It's unfortunate for the team, but hopefully they'll find new positions quickly.

VirtualBox has been on life support for the past few years, not seeing any major development since Sun got acquired by Oracle.

If the same thing happens for VMWare Workstation, I fear we're entering a dark age for desktop virtualization...

VirtualBox is actually fairly strategic inside big-O. They had to sort out its positioning vis-a-vis Oracle VM and "the cloud", as well as dealing with the usual wave of developers leaving (Oracle and Sun are very different cultures...) but I think they've since rebooted its development in earnest.

5.X just came out a few months ago. It's pretty good.

OMG. My heart is literally in my mouth right now.

I've been using linux (centos) since '06. I've tried nearly all of the virtualisation products out there and always stuck with VMWare. On the desktop I've bounced from Windows, to Linux (ubuntu) to now a mac.

VM Fusion pretty much gets installed as my first app which allows me to run a linux env for development. Shared Folders is mandatory for me. Snapshots is a good send and never ever ever crashing no matter what I do with it via Windows 7 in it's own VM.

I'm so in bed with Vmware Fusion right now, I cannot think that another product will replace it. I know there are other products, but these don't simply cut it at all.

I will be praying to the apple or virtualisation "gods" out there and hoping someone buys the team and either spins off a new product or carries on.

I guess after 2017, I will hope the product keeps on working and keeps running with the latest mac releases.

Hopefully someone can make a petition to Apple to buy this team also. I'd sign it. They have the money after all and it would be a great addition to the OS.

This is really a shame. I have bought many VMWare versions over the years (both Workstation and Fusion). I have always liked the product for it's performance and nice interface.

I have fond memories of VMWare Express, the first VMWare that I bought. It was a restricted version of VMWare workstation that could only run Windows 9x (Win4Lin was also nice), but all that I could afford on a student budget. At some point I even got it working on NetBSD with its Linux compatibility layer and (IIRC) some NetBSD kernel modules that someone implemented for VMWare Workstation 2.x. There's still a screenshot on the NetBSD website sporting my NetBSD desktop with VMWare Express in 2002:

https://www.netbsd.org/gallery/in-Action/dekok-vmware.png

HN comment by chipx86 on Workstation dev history: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10978913

Just some perspective ...

There was a time when a specific version of vmware workstation (version 3.x from ... 2001 ? 2002 ?) had a nice, detailed recipe to get it running, under linux binary compat, on FreeBSD.

So you could run the Linux version of vmware workstation on FreeBSD.

The problem was, this recipe and set of hacks needed to make this work only worked with vmware 3, and after 2003 or 2004, vmware wouldn't even sell it to you - you couldn't even download it.

But I kept a copy and continued to very happily use vmware3 until 2009, on successively newer FreeBSD hosts. No, it didn't have graphics card support and I couldn't plug in my USB flash drives, etc., but the basic value proposition was still there - run any guest OS I felt like.

My point is: don't trash your old install packages for (whatever version of vmware workstation you like) and keep your serial numbers - this is a piece of software that can continue providing very high value LONG after vmware abandons it.

The way Apple keeps on changing OS X, I worry about how viable Fusion is in the long run if VMware stops updating it or their QA slips as they update it.

The tl;dr is that the engineers responsible for VMware Workstation and VMware Fusion were just laid off.

The article asks the obvious question of whether the products will continue to be available in maintenance mode, or whether they will be discontinued?

Wow!

VMware has to follow their own rules, they have an official End Of Life support strategy and that means they have to at least support VMware Fusion until 2017/02/25 [1]

There are currently no official statements on what will happen with the products, but I would expect them to try and continue the product. Then again.. who knows.

[1] - http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/support/Product-Lifecycle-Ma...

"VMware has to follow their own rules" ... or what, exactly? I don't think you can buy a support contract for Fusion.

And what exactly is support? Major improvements? Bug fixes? Security?

I seriously hope people from the VMWare Fusion team stick together and release their own competing product for OSX.

Apple needs to buy this team.

One of the few products I find irreplaceable is Fusion. The fact that we could test and build on our desktops in Fusion or Workstation and deploy straight to VSphere kept us hooked on VMware's products.

With this change we're going to be looking at Hyper-V a lot sooner than I expected, but I guess this was bound to happen regardless. More and more of the devs I work with are using Vagrant or Docker and LXC rather than Workstation or Fusion. Hosted UI sales must've been trending down.

VMWare Workstation was a great product - I used it right from the very earliest betas on Linux. But somewhere along the line they seemed to stop taking an interest in individual purchasers like me. I stopped getting the reminders to purchase an upgrade license, and then before I noticed I'd fallen off the upgrade treadmill and catching up to a current version was just too expensive to justify.

This news is dismaying.

For many years, I've been running many Linux VMs and a few Windows VMs using Fusion on various Mac hardware and OSes. It's been super-helpful to my workflow (mostly teaching-related), at very low cost, measured in either dollars or hours.

Thanks to all who helped to make that happen, and best wishes to developers and users as the future unfolds.

This is a shame. I go back and forth between Virtual Box and Workstation. However Virtual Box's external USB device support works only 50% of the time for me. Does anyone here have suggestions for someone running Windows and Virtualizing Windows and Linux ?

With the ubiquity of virtualization today it's easy to forget how magical this was in 1999. "I'm running another computer within my computer! At (close enough to) FULL SPEED!"

Thank you chipx86 and everyone else who brought this sorcery into my life.

Wow. I still use VMWare Workstation all the time. I guess it's time to switch to VirtualBox and Windows 10 for my occasional MS Office needs.

If this isn't a sign of the decline of enterprise desktop software, nothing is!

Dell / EMC / Vmware Borlanding all over again.

Deleted comment

When VMware talks about End User Computing to be its taking about their Horizon View VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) products for enterprise VDI and not Workstation and Fusion.

Completely different products and categories.

VMware definitely mentally categorizes Horizon and such to be EUC, but Workstation and Fusion were as much EUC as anything else. It started as the division to own both View and Workstation/Fusion.

Well that explains a lot. It makes the celebration less inappropriate.

I've deleted my original comment.

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