VMware Fusion and Workstation Are Now Free for All Users | Hacker News Reader

VMware Fusion and Workstation Are Now Free for All Users

blogs.vmware.com

79 pointsWalterSobchak47 comments

Nice try Broadcom! I gave virt-manager a try and am happy to have made the switch.

I'll never install a VMware product again.

Please elaborate. Are these products likely dead now that Broadcom bought VMWare?

I still use both, but only for VMs on Mac and Windows, which is not how I normally run VMs. (That being KVM/QEMU on Linux.)

Broadcom changed their licensing recently, charging much much more for most of their stuff. They also, IIRC, announced Workstation was going away. They are destroying all trust with those who use it. So when they announce this is free, it's hard not to think that means they won't update it any more as they are going to extremes to make $.

It’s like Oracle offering something for “free”. We all know it isn’t. The question is just what strings are attached

All big corps have strings attached on their free stuff, just like they don't contribute to FOSS out of the kindness of their hearts on the management board.

Free offerings from different corps are not equal in their concerns. With Google, my concern is they simply kill or abandon their project. With Oracle, I have to worry about lawyers knocking down my door for a license audit

Google, like other hyperscalers, has some nice surprises on GCP bills, when things go beyond the free to play.

They can also kill someone's business, that depends on those products, or forbid them to use Play Store with similar outcome, even though Android development is mostly free.

virt-manager is amazing and yet it kind of boggles my mind that its 1) depreciated in RHEL8, and 2) hasn't had an official release since 2022.

I think cockpit is the new cool tool. But yes, virt-manager is damn good and has been for a long time.

This. I've had issues with virt-manager in the past, but Cockpit allowed me to interact with the machines and get them back on track.

Instead of waiting for the rug pull, just use something open source.

I gave up on VirtualBox because their sound broke one day and never got fixed. Switching to qemu wasn't a breeze but it wasn't a debacle either. Just found the right args and saved it as a script

UTM is an excellent macOS Qemu frontend and it’s open source.

https://mac.getutm.app/

Fusion is a commercial product, and UTM is a hobbyist project. How can you compare these two?

On how well the software caters to what a person needs?

It's actually pretty damning for Fusion that an hobbyist project can punch high enough to "compete" with professional software.

> It's actually pretty damning for Fusion that an hobbyist project can punch high enough to "compete" with professional software.

Except that it doesn't.

Last time I've tried to integrate it to the testing system of my company it didn't support snapshots, CLI interface couldn't be used through SSH without the GUI subsystem working, and sometimes UTM displayed crypting errors during VM startups.

Personally I use UTM at least once a week, and when it works then it works OK, but saying that it matches a commercial product in terms of functionality means that either someone hasn't really used UTM or Fusion, or has distorted imagination what should be required of a software product that should be used in a commercial setting.

If you need a CLI you should be able to just directly use Qemu instead, as UTM is just a frontend for it.

For my needs, UTM is actually superior to Fusion because it supports emulation of other architectures as well as virtualization. This is really handy on Apple Silicon.

Recently tried it and was severely frustrated how hard it was to use and how limited it was (no snapshots), and how terrible the documentation was.

After endless PR blunders, they're trying to lure back customers probably with a spam platform or freemium nonsense. Nope, they shat the bed and now they have to sleep in it.

Even their Pro version are free. So are they basically abandoning the project and giving it away?

Yep.

Workstation Pro/Fusion Pro were made free for personal users in May: https://blogs.vmware.com/workstation/2024/05/vmware-workstat...

Literally a few days ago I was on their website trying to figure out how I could possibly get a commercial license just to test an OVA. Going through sales, convincing my manager to make a PO, and going through the expense reimbursement process is a lot of hoops to jump through just to test a virtual machine.

I am using VirtualBox. Who will be happy about this? Server Hosting providers?

Server hosts are already using vsphere or some other products. The produced being made free are intended for desktop usage.

No, VPSes use Xen and KVM because VMware is too damn expensive for anything but corporate IT workloads.

post-broadcom acquisition, it too expensive even for that!

It's the complacency trap many FOSS and non-FOSS legacy products fall into when corporate bureaucracy dominates while failing to realize their policies and practices are counterproductive.

CFEngine2->3, SugarCRM, Mongo, Couchbase, any CA or IBM product

That, or OpenStack. I know it's a bigger deal for telcos and wraps kvm, but it's very reliable, scalable, and has all the features a hosting provider would need.

OpenStack isn't a hypervisor! It's a system to emulate AWS locally that requires a hypervisor to present multiple system images.

You're right that it's not a hypervisor, but it's not an AWS emulator either. It's a collection of tightly coupled management layers for other open source projects that form a new, cohesive whole that can be competitive with AWS at a medium scale.

> "or other products"

I didn't feel like making a complete overview of the whole landscape, since this news is about VMware workstation in specific. Therefore any VMWare product in use by server hosts would in all likelihood not be VMWare Workstation/Fusion.

You didn't list anything substantive because you don't understand the landscape, so you used weasel words.

Aside from your personal attack, this is besides the point, as this is about a desktop product not a server product, which is the important difference that had to be noted in response to the post I was replying to.

Please refrain from personal attacks on this forum, it's one of the last nice places on the Internet.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> I am using VirtualBox. Who will be happy about this? Server Hosting providers?

One group would be macOS users who want to virtualize ARM64.

See also VMware Workstation Shifting from Proprietary Code to Using Upstream KVM (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42013032) which I'm sure plays into this too ...

A while ago (like ~10 years ago) VMWare workstation, or some of the things virtualbox graphics drivers did, seemed to be the only reasonable ways to run a virtualised desktop with 3d or at more than 5fps. But these days virtio and spice seems to work just fine.

What a nice trap to set

After Broadcom's incredible zeal at killing their prized goose that lays golden eggs, they are killing it to a point of beating a dead horse.

Can we kill the goose again? Maybe harder this time

My number one choice for desktop hypervisor on Linux would be virtualbox, except that unity mode hasn’t worked in years and that’s my most needed feature.

It feels like a weird spot to be in that there’s a bunch of competing options and all of them have weirdness or broken features (no slight to the people building these - far be it from me to complain about free stuff).

VMware Workstation was my go to for "Desktop Linux", nowadays I use WSL, and most likely this is the main reason it is now free, before getting the axe eventually.

Each time you run WSL, you help MS with the first "E" in embrace-extend-extinguish sequence.

Modern day Microsoft can't even get the Extend step right with "curl".

What's the best alternative?

(since so many people in this thread think this is the end of VMware)

“The paid versions of these offerings – Workstation Pro and Fusion Pro – are no longer available for purchase. ”

…”Once your current contract concludes, you can continue using the product. However, please note that support ticketing for troubleshooting will no longer be available.”

I can almost smell the bitrot problems from here.

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