News Despite brutal price hikes on many products, VMWare makes Fusion Pro and Workstation Pro free for all users

[Admin]

VMWare makes its Fusion and Workstation Editions free to all users and slowly winds down Active Support functions.

Despite brutal price hikes on many products, VMWare makes Fusion Pro and Workstation Pro free for all users : Read more

 

[bit_user]

I think it's not being done out of generosity, but rather to draw in long time users of Linux' KVM (i.e. Kernel VM) facility, as they have recently transitioned to it.

https://www.phoronix.com/news/VMware-Workstation-KVM
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That said, I don't know much about either. There are probably a lot more insights shared in the Phoronix comment thread.

At my job, we've mostly transitioned from VMWare to Proxmox.

 

[sadsteve]

Eh, I'll stick with QEMU/KVM/libvirt. It was rather easy to get a Windows VM up an running for my games that wouldn't work under Linux (yet!), Affinity Photo and TruboTax.

 

[SomeoneElse23]

As always, this sucks a bit for those that purchased it, or purchased an upgrade (like me).

That said, I'm curious to see how Broadcom manages this ongoing. They really bungled the upgrade process after they acquired VMWare, making customers navigate their labyrinth, I mean, website, often to no avail.

If they keep upgrading it, providing support for ongoing versions of Windows and hardware, and making it easy to obtain without risking running into a minotaur, it's a good thing all around.

But I suspect they intend to kill it long term, as that's what large corporations do with products they acquired that they don't really want.

 

[emike09]

We just barely renewed licensing for ESXI 8/vCenter on 5 brand new servers and 4 existing servers. Much to my disappointment. A lot of guys on my team only know VMWare and didn't want to change (and they aren't old fogies).

I set up full test environments in Hyper-V and Proxmox. We're 95% a Windows Server shop, so I didn't mind going the Hyper-V route that I'm very familiar with, and we almost did, but they didn't even care for Proxmox at all. Datacenter licensing in Hyper-V makes life pretty easy these days and has so many included features we'd use that we couldn't afford with VMWare.

Ultimately, I'm quite disappointed we stuck with VMWare, especially with how much of a nightmare it's been working with Broadcom. Terrible website, and insanely long wait times for Broadcom to provide any licensing or support. And that price tag was hard to swallow. We would have saved 50k going any route besides VMWare, and that doesn't include Windows Server licensing.

 

[abufrejoval]

I've bought and used every edition of VMware (Workstation), since the very first they launched in 1999 or so, right after tricking x86 CPUs into running 32-bit VMs via 80486SL derivatives that included the SMM layer, with plenty of traps and a bit of binary translation.

There only was what "Workstation" is today, it is the original product, a type 2 hypervisor. Their type 1 vSphere offerings came generations later.

It's helped me tremendously for all sorts of experimentation, but I've never used any VMware product in production, because it was operationally and financially far too inefficient.

Actually, much of my career was built on offering much better and cheaper VMware (or Nutanix) replacements for production, based on OpenVZ containers. And it was KVM and/or Docker/Podman or even LXC only, when OpenVZ stopped giving.

Xen was an important catalyst, too, but I see its future rather bleak. If only it didn't come with such a lot of legacy, because the notion of Library OSs really needs a modern implementation.

VMware Workstation may be free now, but its quality has suffered badly with Broadcom. I've tried the 12.6 release and it just has so many quality issues (which previously version rarely had), that it's time to say goodbye.

Too bad there is really no alternative on Windows: Hyper-V just never compared in terms of features like nested virtualization, was painful to use and way too instrusive on the Windows OS.

VirtualBox is at least better than Hyper-V on Windows, but on Linux it's also just become another GUI for KVM (and Linux has better there), because it's simply better than all the proprietary type 2 hypervisors that used to compete in that space.

I'd really like to have KVM on Windows, too, or rather I guess Windows should just drop its VMS base (sorry David Cutler!) and run as a GUI variant on Linux.

Just like the VM vendors are shedding their proprietary hypervisors, it's high time for Windows as an OS to go.

And as soon as my full Steam library no longer looks like fecal matter [happy moderator?] on Linux, I'm happy to move early and stick with KVM for VMs.

Still would like OpenVZ containers, though, so much better than LXC and Docker/Podman could be options, shouldn't be exclusive choices.

Just to be clear: there is no "despite". This is a cost cutting move pure and simple. Broadcom isn't into altruism. "Workstation" may be how VMware got started by Rosenblum and Greene, but it probably stopped being a money-maker long ago, and it certainly doesn't have a future by standard Broadcom profit requirements.

It also means that support will be minimal to non-existant and it shows in what's left of QA.