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Did they lay off the whole team to the point where they can't even push updates? Their second-to-last blog post is about a hotfix that they haven't released a proper 8.1.1 patch release for in several months, you have to download a random file from their blog and manually patch it in via the terminal...?!

http://blogs.vmware.com/teamfusion/2016/01/workaround-of-nat...

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Presumably yes - people that worked there described it as: "VMware has decided to lay off the entire Fusion and Workstation teams."

https://twitter.com/jdotk/status/691771635771244545

They haven't release any patches since... :(

But they had the gall of running promotions on twitter...

Yeah, and since I had just "switched" back to Mac and had a shiny, new MBP, I jumped and bought it. I don't think I had even used it yet when they announced the layoffs. :/

Jason has actually been rehired. [0]. You're correct on no patches since, but patches never were that fast anyways.

[0] https://twitter.com/jdotk/status/709520637396656128

If you're on OS X, Veertu uses the inbuilt OS X hypervisor and has waay less interactive latency than Fusion did, seemingly as a result. It's also significantly cheaper.

My problem with veertu is the same as with Hyper-V: it's not crossplatform. With all its warts, VMW offered the best turnkey solution for small teams occasionally sharing VMs in offline contexts.

From 2016-01-27: "VMware Fusion, Workstation team culled in company restructure"

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/01/vmware...

Personally I suspect that they're offshoring these products rather than killing them completely.

I don't think so. I left VMware in late 2015. The news came to be a bit of a shock to me. Everyone that I've talked to about the layoffs was/is completely surprised about the fate of Fusion and Workstation. Every single person on those teams was let go. They were fairly small teams.

Also, it's worth noting that Workstation and Fusion will be EOL by March, 2017.

On a related note. It annoys me, in articles about VMware, when they mention that EMC owns 80% of VMware. Yes, that's true, BUT... EMC owns 97% of the voting stock. Once Dell finishes the acquisition, you might as well just call VMware a private company.

What's a good alternative to VMware Fusion?

There's really only two other choices, Parallels or VirtualBox.

The problem with Parallels is that they've changed their product price structure to be a yearly payment (and I like to own the software I pay for, and only buy newer version when I need it) and, unlike VMware, they don't donate to open source projects, like FreeBSD (https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/donors/).

I hate parallel's business model. I bought Parallels version 10 in a box with a free upgrade to 11. It sat in the box for about a month after I got it and to my horror I found out the offer expired literally 1 day before I tried to redeem it. I contacted their support but they flatly refused to give me the free upgrade. I bought Fusion and I'll never give Parallel's another dime, this I vow.

From a technical perspective, I actually preferred Parallels over Fusion but their constant advertising inside of Parallels really annoyed the hell out of me, especially considering I paid full price out of my own pocket for it.

Veertu looks promising (http://veertu.com/)

Know anyone that's tried it?

I'd like an alternative to VMWare Fusion but don't want VirtualBox.

Other challenge is Fusion allows me to transfer VMs to my home ESXi box pretty easily, so I'd lose that too by switching

Yep, me. Fucking love Veertu, to the point where it looks like I'm spamming threads!

Veertu is way less featureful than Fusion but the latency means it's INSANELY fast. Windows 10 installs in sub 5 mins, but more to the point it just doesn't suck due to lag like Fusion did. I actually test on Edge now.

Anything EMC touches eventually turns to shit.

"Also, it's worth noting that Workstation and Fusion will be EOL by March, 2017"

And yet they are still sending me Fusion special offer emails. It feels dishonest is they really intend to EOL it in a year.

If they are EOLing them, I wonder if an investment group could buy those products out from under VMWare and rehire the original dev team. Anyone from the original team know how much tech was shared with exsi/vsphere?

Offshoring indeed, not exactly in the best way, but that is what happened. They have a new UI team now twice the size of the old one.

For more info see update3 on this post. http://planetvm.net/blog/?p=2952

The Palo Alto-based dev team was laid off and a new team in Beijing will continue to develop the Workstation and Fusion products. Given that a workaround for the NAT issue was published on the blog, I would expect the next maintenance release of Fusion to fix the issue.

Source: I was on the Workstation team when the layoff happened.

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