[HN Gopher] VMware Fusion Pro: Now available free for personal use
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VMware Fusion Pro: Now available free for personal use
Author : ganoushoreilly
Score : 251 points
Date : 2024-05-14 16:55 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blogs.vmware.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (blogs.vmware.com)
| ganoushoreilly wrote:
| I've mixed feelings on this. One side I love it's free, the
| annual pricing seems reasonable to what it was. On the other,
| i've been so burned by their pricing for everything else with
| clients that i'm reticent to be thankful.
|
| I suppose it's a step in the right direction, bringing back ESXI
| for homelab users would be a good step too.
| lostlogin wrote:
| > bringing back ESXI for homelab users would be a good step
| too.
|
| It would be interesting if they did. So many have now tried
| Proxmox and liked it.
| riffic wrote:
| all the homelabbers have moved on to proxmox ve
| accrual wrote:
| > bringing back ESXI for homelab users would be a good step
| too.
|
| I agree and frankly I think it was smart VMWare had a a free
| tier for homelab users. It produces new users who can now more
| easily enter the workforce with ESXi experience they might not
| otherwise have.
|
| By locking it down and jacking up prices they'll squeeze out
| more money now, but eventually the market will shift to
| whatever everyone has the most experience with, which might end
| up being Proxmox.
| mickelsen wrote:
| Given that this is owned Broadcom now, and they are going all in
| with squeezing every last drop from ESXi and similar offerings, I
| wonder what's gonna happen with Fusion in the future; while now
| you only pay for commercial usage, maybe they are going to let it
| rot over the years until it's no longer cutting edge software?
| Would they keep it as a loss-leader?
| AshamedCaptain wrote:
| Workstation was already rotting for all intents and purposes.
| Likely Fusion was also rotting since the switch to ARM but
| never tried it.
|
| The entire space ("desktop virtualization") is dead. Even
| VirtualBox which I praised a year ago seems to be slowing down.
|
| This likely just poisons the well for a market they had all but
| abandoned.
| bee_rider wrote:
| I don't know anything about high-end workstations really. But
| I wonder if the whole ecosystem is in a rough spot generally?
| Seems like cloud tooling is always getting easier.
|
| Shame really, people do fun stuff with excess compute.
| ghaff wrote:
| Pretty much all desktop virtualization/VDI/etc. products have
| been de-emphasized by essentially everybody except to the
| degree that they're a largely free byproduct of server
| virtualization. I doubt any company is devoting more than a
| minimal number of resources to these products--maybe Apple
| more than others. Red Hat, for example, even sun-setted its
| "traditional" enterprise virtualization product in favor of
| Kuvevirt on OpenShift. And a VDI product was pretty much
| abandoned years ago.
| Thaxll wrote:
| Virtual box was never good, it always felt half baked.
| znpy wrote:
| Years ago (pre-oracle) it was enough though: i have fond
| memories of using it with vagrant and be heppy.
| accrual wrote:
| Yes, when it was Sun VirtualBox I remember it was a
| favorite for testing out other operating systems for free
| with a simple UI. It wasn't the most powerful or
| flexible, but it's what was recommended if you wanted to
| (for example) try Ubuntu on your Windows host without
| dual boot or using another disk, etc.
| AshamedCaptain wrote:
| My point is that at least their paid support fixed the
| things I asked them to fix; I cannot say the same of VMware
| where support was already non-existent a couple years ago
| (I stopped using them the moment someone here in HN said
| the entire Workstation staff had been fired and replaced
| with skeleton overseas crew, and this was way before
| Broadcom).
| bombcar wrote:
| Fusion became basically worthless when you couldn't easily run
| Intel Windows on a Mac anymore because the underlying processor
| changed.
| stephenr wrote:
| ... I've had a Fusion licence since v10 was current (~2017)
| and I don't think I've used it to run Windows even once.
| codetrotter wrote:
| I wonder how common that is though.
|
| In terms of people who might consider Fusion you have:
|
| - People who only use Windows
|
| - People who only use macOS
|
| - People who only use Linux
|
| - People who virtualize Windows on macOS
|
| - People who virtualize Linux on macOS
|
| - People who run FreeBSD or similar on their computers
|
| - People who virtualize FreeBSD or similar on macOS
|
| - People who virtualize various operating systems on
| Windows
|
| - People who virtualize various operating systems on Linux
|
| - People who virtualize various operating systems on
| FreeBSD or similar
|
| And I would guess that the largest group of people that use
| Fusion use it for running Windows in a VM on macOS.
|
| I would guess that the people who develop for Linux servers
| would mainly use Docker if they run macOS, and that also
| relies on VM, but not using Fusion.
| rcarmo wrote:
| Well, I use Parallels to run a Windows VM for work (on
| ARM). It's its own little bubble universe, completely
| isolated from my Mac desktop, but available at a swipe.
|
| I do use Fusion as well (on my laptop), and have a
| Windows VM there as well, but solely to run older games.
| Works fine.
| basil-rash wrote:
| What about people who virtualize various operating
| systems on macOS? That was my entire team at a prior
| engagement (at Microsoft, as it happens...). I suspect
| it's a large number, developers tend to like macOS, so if
| you're making a cross platform application and want to be
| able to test anything at all, you need a VM.
| stephenr wrote:
| The argument given was that VMWare became useless because
| of the switch to Arm.
|
| There are more Hypervisor managers available on macOS now
| than there have ever been before - largely because Apple
| provides the underlying framework to do most of the hard
| work... but there is _clearly_ significant demand to run
| VMs on Arm Macs still, regardless of whether that
| includes running Windows (which _does_ exist for Arm too)
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > I would guess that the people who develop for Linux
| servers would mainly use Docker if they run macOS, and
| that also relies on VM, but not using Fusion.
|
| x86 Docker on ARM Mac is an insanely complex setup - it
| runs an ARM Linux VM inside Hypervisor.framework that
| then uses a Rosetta client via binfmt that <somehow>
| communicates with the host macOS to set up all the
| Rosetta specific stuff and prepare the client process to
| use TSO for fast x86 memory access.
|
| Unfortunately, Apple _heavily_ gates anything Rosetta, I
| 'm amazed Docker got enough coordination done with them -
| because QEMU didn't, they don't support anything Apple
| ARM-specific as a result and don't plan to unless Apple
| significantly opens up access and documentation; TSO for
| example is gated behind private entitlements.
| bombcar wrote:
| I had Fusion and ran Windows with it early on (it could
| even play some games!) and since I had it, I used it for
| Linux and some other things.
|
| Those are now down with an old ESXi box or other forms of
| VMs now. Maybe I should look into the various VM options
| still, but I don't have any pressing needs.
| TylerE wrote:
| Can't even run x86 Linux on Mac right now
| bombcar wrote:
| Linux has always been a bit of an easier deal because you
| can (often, not always) just get a version for ARM that is
| "close enough".
| TylerE wrote:
| If my case that isn't close as we have deps that aren't
| ported to arm
| darby_eight wrote:
| qemu works as well as it always did--which is to say slow
| as hell but good enough for automation in a pinch
| watermelon0 wrote:
| UTM supports Rosetta in Linux VMs:
| https://docs.getutm.app/advanced/rosetta/
|
| OS still needs to be ARM, as far as I know, but you can
| then use Rosetta to speed-up x86_64 Linux binaries.
|
| Docker Desktop also uses this to run x86_64 Docker images,
| and in many cases performance is quite close to the native
| ARM binaries, but this heavily depends on the workload.
| eduction wrote:
| Worthless for some use cases but there are reasons to run
| Mac-on-Mac vms, including testing, development, and security
| (isolation). The first two also apply to some folks (maybe
| not many) for Linux VMs.
| gorkish wrote:
| If you want to virtualize something with good performance on
| desktop windows you use Hyper-V; if you want to do it on mac
| you use Apple's Virtualization Framework; if you want to do it
| on Linux you use KVM.
|
| Desktop virtualization products used to bring the secret sauce
| with them; now that every OS ships with a well-integrated and
| well supported type 1 hypervisor they have lost much of the
| reason for existing. There's only so much UI you can put in
| front of off-the-shelf os features and still charge hundreds of
| dollars per year for.
| rcarmo wrote:
| They still need to. You are glossing over the fact that you
| need to provide device access, USB access, graphics, and a
| lot of things that are not necessarily provided by the
| "native" hypervisor (HyperKit does not do even half of what
| Parallels does, for instance).
| zten wrote:
| Yeah, if you care about 3D acceleration on a Windows guest
| and aren't doing pcie passthrough, then KVM sure isn't
| going to do it. There is a driver in the works, but it's
| not there yet.
|
| edit: I made a mistake and got confused in my head with
| qemu and the lack of paravirtualized support. (It does have
| a PV 3D linux driver, though)
| xxpor wrote:
| Do any of the commercial hypervisors do that today?
| reanimus wrote:
| Pretty much all of them do, though the platform support
| varies by hypervisor/guest OS. Paravirtualized (aka non-
| passthrough) 3D acceleration has been implemented for
| well over a decade.
| wongarsu wrote:
| However NVIDIA limits it to datacenter GPUs. And you
| might need an additional license, not sure about that. In
| their view it's a product for Citrix and other virtual
| desktops, not something a normal consumer needs.
| gorkish wrote:
| KVM will happily work with real virtual GPU support from
| every vendor; it's the vendors (except for intel) that
| feel the need to artificially limit who is allowed to use
| these features.
| zten wrote:
| I was mostly hoping qemu would get paravirtualized
| support some day, because it is leagues ahead of VMware
| Player in speed. Everyone's hopes are riding on
| https://github.com/virtio-win/kvm-guest-drivers-
| windows/pull....
| AshamedCaptain wrote:
| There has been a driver "in the works" for the past
| decade. Never coming. MS/Apple do not make it easy
| anyway.
| jhiesey wrote:
| Agreed. Virtualized 3d acceleration in particular still has
| quite a bit of "secret sauce" left in it.
| gorkish wrote:
| Today this is mostly implemented by having a guest driver
| pass calls through to a layer on the host that does the
| actual rendering. While I agree that there is a lot of
| magic to making such an arrangement work, it's a terrible
| awful idea to suggest that relying on a vendor's
| emulation layer is how things should be done today.
|
| Proper GPU virtualization and/or partitioning is the
| right way to do it and the vendors need to get their
| heads out of their ass and stop restricting its use on
| consumer hardware. Intel already does; you can use GVT-g
| to get guest gpu on any platform that wants to implement
| it.
| AshamedCaptain wrote:
| So you say having a decoupled arrangement in software
| (which happens to be a de facto open standard) is a
| "terrible awful idea" and that instead you should just
| rely on whatever your proprietary hardware graphics
| vendor proposes to you? Why?
|
| And that's assuming they propose anything at all.
|
| Even GVT-g breaks every other Linux release, is at risk
| of being abandoned by Intel (e.g. how they already
| abandoned the Xen version) or limited to specific CPU
| market segments, and already has ridiculous limitations
| such as a limit on the number of concurrent framebuffers
| AND framebuffer sizes (why? VMware Workstation offers you
| an infinitely resizable window, does it with 3D
| acceleration just fine, and I have never been able to
| tell if they have a limit on the number of simultaneous
| VMs... ).
|
| In the meanwhile "software-based GPU virtualization"
| allows me to share GPUs in the host that will never have
| hardware-based partitioning support (e.g. ANY consumer
| AMD card), and allows guests to have working 3D by
| implementing only one interface (e.g.
| https://github.com/JHRobotics/softgpu for retro Windows)
| instead of having to implement drivers for every GPU in
| existence.
| derefr wrote:
| > So you say having a decoupled arrangement in software
| (which happens to be a de facto open standard) is a
| "terrible awful idea" and that instead you should just
| rely on whatever your proprietary hardware graphics
| vendor proposes to you? Why?
|
| Sandboxing, and resource quotas / allocations /
| reservations.
|
| By itself, a paravirtualized GPU just treats each
| userland workload launched by any given guest onto the
| GPU, as all being siblings -- exactly as if there was no
| virtualization and you were just running multiple
| workloads on one host.
|
| And so, just like multiple GPU-using apps on a single
| non-virtualized host, these workloads will get "thin-
| provisioned" the resources they need, as they ask for
| them, with no advance reservation; and workloads may very
| well end up fighting over those resources, if they
| attempt to use a lot of them. You're just not supposed to
| run two things that attempt to use "as much VRAM as
| possible" at once.
|
| This means that, on a multi-tenant hypervisor host (e.g.
| the "with GPU" compute machines in most clouds), a
| paravirtualized GPU would give no protection at all from
| one tenant using all of a host GPU's resources, leaving
| none left over for the other guests sharing that host
| GPU. The cloud vendor would have guaranteed each tenant
| so much GPU capacity -- but that guarantee would be
| empty!
|
| To enforce multi-tenant QoS, you _need_ hardware-
| supported virtualization -- i.e. the ability to make
| "all of the GPU" actually mean "some of the GPU",
| defining _how much_ GPU that is on a per-guest basis.
|
| (And even in PC use-cases, you don't want a guest to be
| able to starve the host! Especially if you might be
| running _untrusted_ workloads inside the guest, for e.g.
| forensic analysis!)
| skissane wrote:
| Why does multi-tenant QoS _require_ hardware-supported
| virtualisation?
|
| An operating system doesn't require virtualisation to
| manage application resource usage of CPU time, system
| memory, disk storage, etc - although the details differ
| from OS to OS, most operating systems have quota and/or
| prioritisation mechanisms for these - why not for the GPU
| too?
|
| There is no reason in principle why you can't do that for
| the GPU too. In fact, there have been a series of Linux
| cgroup patches going back several years now, to add GPU
| quotas to Linux cgroups, so you can setup per-app quotas
| on GPU time and GPU memory - https://lwn.net/ml/cgroups/2
| 0231024160727.282960-1-tvrtko.ur... is the most recent I
| could find (from 6-7 months back), but there were earlier
| iterations broader in scope, e.g. https://lwn.net/ml/cgro
| ups/20210126214626.16260-1-brian.welt... (from 3+ years
| ago). For whatever reason none of these have yet been
| merged to the mainline Linux kernel, but I expect it is
| going to happen eventually (especially with all the
| current focus on GPUs for AI applications). Once you have
| cgroups support for GPUs, why couldn't a paravirtualised
| GPU driver on a Linux host use that to provide GPU
| resource management?
|
| And I don't see why it has to wait for GPU cgroups to be
| upstreamed in the Linux kernel - if all you care about is
| VMs and not any non-virtualised apps on the same
| hardware, why couldn't the hypervisor implement the same
| logic inside a paravirtualised GPU driver?
| gorkish wrote:
| > have lost much of the reason
|
| I didn't say they have no reason to exist. I indicated they
| are moving towards becoming UI shells around standard OS
| features and/or other commodity software, which they are.
| Look at UTM, for instance. Even VMware Workstation and
| VirtualBox on Windows use HyperV under the hood if you have
| HyperV or WSL features enabled.
|
| While everyone still seems to be busy disagreeing with me
| because of <insert favorite feature>, I'll mention that
| HyperV does have official support for transparent GPU
| paravirtualization with nvidia cards, and there are plenty
| of other open projects in the works that strive to "bleed
| through" graphics/gpu/other hardware acceleration api's
| from host to guest on other platforms and hypervisors. With
| vendors finally settling around virtio as somewhat of a
| 'standard pipe' for this, expect rapid progress to
| continue.
| AshamedCaptain wrote:
| > Even VMware Workstation and VirtualBox on Windows use
| HyperV under the hood if you have HyperV or WSL features
| enabled.
|
| VirtualBox is consistently (and significantly) slower
| when it uses HyperV as backend than when it uses its
| original driver, and many features are not supported at
| all with HyperV. In fact the GUI actually shows a
| "tortoise" icon in the status bar when running with
| HyperV backend.
| basil-rash wrote:
| It's not the UI you charge for, it's the Enterprise Support
| Plan.
| fifteen1506 wrote:
| Worse, it's actively worse VMware on Windows vs Hyper-V.
| packetlost wrote:
| VMWork workstation still has a massive leg up in 3d (and to
| some extent, 2d) video acceleration. Many programs need this
| to run smoothly these days
| Thaxll wrote:
| Hyper v doesn't have 3d acceleration, so if you play game or
| want to use linux desktops it's pretty bad.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| WSL2 seems to virtualize the GPU pretty well, I had an
| easier time getting my GPU to work for machine learning
| inside WSL2 than I have with plain Windows and Linux in the
| past.
| doublerabbit wrote:
| And if you want to do it on FreeBSD you use bHyve.
| netrap wrote:
| If you want to pass through USB, SCSI, or something like that
| then VMWare Workstation is better than Hyper-V for sure.
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| Am I the only one who explicitly does not want type 1 hyper
| visor on my desktop? Am I out dated?
|
| I like workstation and virtualbox because they're
| controllable and minimally impactful when I'm not using them.
|
| Installing hyper v (and historically even WSL - not sure if
| it's still the case but it was never sufficiently explicit)
| now makes my primary OS a guest, with potential impact on my
| gaming, multimedia, and other performance (and occasional
| flaky issues with drivers and whatnots).
|
| Am I the only grouchy geezer here?:-)
| Kwpolska wrote:
| Apart from Hyper-V and WSL, some Windows 11 security
| features also depend on virtualization.
|
| Did you measure the performance hit? How often did you
| encounter driver trouble?
| Shank wrote:
| I'm surprised they're making Workstation and Fusion free, given
| that they killed off the free ESXi/vSphere hypervisor. Seems
| strange?
| bombcar wrote:
| I suspect they knew (and to be fair, probably correct) that a
| decent number of small businesses (and maybe even larger ones)
| were using ESXi and they just decided to shut that down in a
| push to get more licenses.
|
| If my theory is correct, in about two years (if they haven't
| killed it entirely by the) they'll introduce a "free for
| homelab use" variant - maybe.
|
| But Workstation and Fusion were more used by personal people
| and as a support tool FOR professionals, so they needed to keep
| those going, but charging $79 for it just wasn't worth the
| hassle. Notice they're not even selling ANY licenses directly
| anymore; you have to go through someone else. VMWare sold
| directly.
| ghaff wrote:
| Not just not worth the hassle. The product being free now
| means that if someone files a bug report or request for
| enhancement, they can more easily just shrug and say "won't
| fix."
| thesnide wrote:
| This.
|
| And evenmore, the lesser versions were free for everyone to
| use.
|
| But now, if you are a business you don't have any free
| offering anymore.
|
| I guess it makes a lot of sense, to go only after the ones
| that can pay, the rest would have "other" ways to run it
| anyway.,,
| bonton89 wrote:
| You could use Workstation Pro to directly assess VMs running on
| an ESXi server, so maybe the idea is to make company's more
| dependent upon the central infrastructure where they can
| squeeze.
|
| You could actually cajole the free player to do this with ESXi
| but it was definitely not license kosher.
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| What @bombcar said.
|
| "Free" ESXi is.. well, free. They are converting enterprises to
| enterprise customers. Some bloke with WKS is not an enterprise
| customer.
| rcarmo wrote:
| I'm trying to figure out exactly how Broadcom expects to profit
| from this, and what this says for their development and support
| roadmap.
| bhako wrote:
| I was wondering if its related to data gathering for ai
| nullstyle wrote:
| Orbstack now serves 100% of my virtualization and docker needs on
| macOS. Hopefully I'll never feel the need to install virtualbox
| or fusion or parallels ever again.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Orbstack is really nice on an M1. But occasionally I run into
| the need for a GUI application and then I'm stuck. Is it
| possible to use Orbstack for that?
| lenerdenator wrote:
| I mean... hooray?
|
| It's probably useful for the HomeLab crowd, but when you get an
| idea and want to scale it for business purposes, you get screwed
| by their recent commercial market moves.
|
| There's the beginnings of real FLOSS virtualization projects out
| there. Broadcom will make some money off of the acquisition as
| measured by quarterly statements, but it's not sustainable over
| the long run. It's not 2005 anymore. Step on enough toes and the
| nerds will build their own and give it away for free.
| luma wrote:
| My guess here: the product isn't valuable enough to sell off (see
| Horizon), the customers who buy the product aren't in their list
| of 600 accounts that they want to focus on, and the invoice price
| is a rounding error next to their enterprise offerings.
|
| Broadcom is bloodthirsty and I'd suggest they're doing this out
| of the goodness of their hearts but there is little evidence that
| they have one.
| gorkish wrote:
| When they say "Free" what they mean is these products are now
| the walking dead. They are on maintenance only support until
| any existing commercial contracts expire at which point they
| will be cancelled.
|
| In this case, I admit that I think it's the right thing to do.
| These products don't really need to exist as commercial
| offerings except for a few very niche cases.
| soneil wrote:
| It doesn't sound like they're trying to kill them, since
| they're moving commercial usage to a subscription license.
|
| I'm not sure killing them actually makes a lot of sense - the
| products apparently share a lot of code with esxi, so it's
| two products for the R&D of one.
| bithavoc wrote:
| I don't trust them anymore
| system2 wrote:
| Nobody does. We all moved to other hypervisors now.
| CSDude wrote:
| It's almost impossible to create an account with all of the
| delays. Even then, I got into a loop in "Trade Compliance
| Verification" which does not proceed.
| dist-epoch wrote:
| On Windows (Pro) Hyper-V is free, and quite good. Maybe it's less
| user friendly.
|
| Windows also has Sandbox (based on container technology), which
| replaces creating a VM to test some software without affecting
| the system.
| qzx_pierri wrote:
| yeah Windows Sandbox is pretty great. I use it to test sketchy
| software when sailing the high seas. And the option to add
| shared readonly folders on the host OS is nice too.
| TowerTall wrote:
| How do you test sketchy software when Windows Defender is
| disabled in Windows Sandbox?
| haunter wrote:
| There is the Hyper-V Server 2019 [0] too which was also free
| and a standalone OS unlike the current version. I use that on a
| 2nd PC, you can also install a full GUI [1] on top of the
| webadmin interface so pretty good actually.
|
| 0, https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/evaluate-
| hyper-v-...
|
| 1,
| https://gist.github.com/bp2008/922b326bf30222b51da08146746c7...
| gettodachoppa wrote:
| Anyone reading this, don't expect a smooth experience for
| desktop Linux under Hyper-V.
|
| Hyper-V's team only cares about supporting servers. You're not
| gonna run a full-screen Ubuntu VM without a lot of banging your
| head against the wall, unless you spend days trawling random
| Github comments and reddit posts and fixing it whenever it
| breaks.
| ryanmccullagh wrote:
| I had purchased Fusion Pro recently due to the better graphics
| support in comparison to VirtualBox. I wonder what the catch is
| here.
| flaxton wrote:
| Download doesn't seem to work. The VMware download area closed in
| late April, and can't seem to download Fusion now. The
| replacement store doesn't seem to be available yet.
|
| I'm using Parallels and it is great on an Apple Silicon Mac, but
| I'm a long-time VMware Workstation and Fusion user, so I'd like
| to try it again.
| kevingadd wrote:
| As a paying Workstation customer, I had to install it from
| scratch the other day and couldn't find a binary anywhere. I
| eventually found an old installer on archive.org (!) and
| settled for that. Grateful to whoever had the foresight to
| point the Wayback Machine at VMWare's CDN before it was too
| late.
| trollbridge wrote:
| And we paying customers did buy a perpetual licence. Better
| archive that download and save your key somewhere...
| skydhash wrote:
| You have to go over to Broadcom website. The VMware store is
| still down.
| raybb wrote:
| What timing. Literally yesterday I was trying to set this up on
| my Mac and went with UTM instead. It worked excellently for
| getting Kali Linux up and doing a WLAN USB passthrough.
| whalesalad wrote:
| Fortunately the open-source VM space is the best it has ever
| been these days. No reason at all to use proprietary crap
| anymore.
| nxobject wrote:
| I've had a lot of frustration getting the SPICE tools to work
| with slightly older Windows OSes (Windows 7 in my case), for
| what it's worth.
| jareds wrote:
| What open source options would you recommend for running
| Linux and Windows VM's on Windows? I've been unhappy with
| Virtualbox because the audio quality is abysmal which is an
| issue since I use screen reading software. I'm interested to
| try out VMWare Workstation since it's audio support was
| pretty good many years ago when I used it at a prior job.
| whalesalad wrote:
| Hyper-V? I don't run VM's on windows, only on Mac and
| Linux. I'd imagine a first class hypervisor like Hyper-V is
| the way to go on that platform. AFAIK it is included with
| Pro versions of Windows.
| darby_eight wrote:
| Performant 3d acceleration in the guest OS is still quite
| difficult to find an open source solution for, and linux
| these days relies heavily on this for window management. Mac
| hosts at least have ParavirtualizedGraphics, even though I
| don't think the popular open source clients have support for
| it yet.
| segasaturn wrote:
| They're very late to do this IMO, but better late than never. I
| am certain that VMWare has not been selling many Workstation
| licenses to personal users (costing ~$300 each) and making the
| products free gives free advertising and mindshare to VMWare.
| Visual Studio is a good example of this, Microsoft making Visual
| Studio free for personal use in 2014 provided a _huge_ boost to a
| platform that a lot of people had written off as dead,
| irrelevant, gray corporate software.
| chrisandchris wrote:
| Except that VMWare is owned by Broadcom, which is known for
| only being interested in Fortune 500. That doesn't at all apply
| to Microsoft. No sane people will buy into VMWare anymore if
| 500k in cash is not a rounding error of your budget.
| IshKebab wrote:
| > to a platform that a lot of people had written off as dead,
| irrelevant, gray corporate software.
|
| I don't think many people had written Visual Studio off like
| that in 2014. Maybe now, given VSCode. But that didn't exist in
| 2014.
| darby_eight wrote:
| What is Visual Studio used for these days? Of course windows
| development, and I'm guessing xbox development too. Anything
| else?
| DannyWebbie wrote:
| Primary IDE for Unity and Unreal. Microsoft has been
| extending beyond Microsoft platforms, so I imagine a decent
| chunk of Visual Studio use is for cross-platform development.
| oblio wrote:
| I'm guessing it's still the IDE of choice of game devs.
| Kipters wrote:
| AFAIK it's also the primary IDE for Sony and Nintendo SDKs
| opentokix wrote:
| Don't get them get away with this, continue to migrate away from
| it.
| dmitrygr wrote:
| Now go try to download it. All links are broken.
|
| https://knowledge.broadcom.com/external/article?articleNumbe...
|
| https://www.vmware.com/content/vmware/vmware-published-sites...
|
| https://customerconnect.vmware.com/web/vmware/downloads/info...
| gruez wrote:
| Found a mirror here:
| https://github.com/201853910/VMwareWorkstation/releases/tag/...
|
| The windows binaries have valid authenticode signatures so at
| least those haven't been tampered with.
| laweijfmvo wrote:
| > Here is a simple KB that describes what to do:
| http://kb.vmware.com/s/article/97817
|
| Another broken link...
| Stagnant wrote:
| I spent like 15 minutes trying to find an official download
| link, even registered a broadcom account but that was a waste
| of time as well. Ended up finding a working download link from
| some reddit comment. It seems to contain all versions of
| fusion, player, workstation and remote console.
|
| https://softwareupdate.vmware.com/cds/vmw-desktop/ws/
| tw04 wrote:
| This is how you know that they're not putting another dime into
| R&D.
| system2 wrote:
| Who cares. They killed ESXi. They are no use to SMBs and people
| who want to learn virtualization.
| michaelmrose wrote:
| Does this offer anything over virt-manager on Linux?
| fulafel wrote:
| The ransomware epidemics targeting ESXi vulnerabilities probably
| triggered an exodus to other hypervisors and this could be an
| attempt to hang on to some users.
| throwitaway222 wrote:
| I mysteriously stopped needing vmware or virtualbox the year
| docker came out, I wonder why...
| belter wrote:
| "7 Ways to Escape a Container" -
| https://www.panoptica.app/research/7-ways-to-escape-a-contai...
| gettodachoppa wrote:
| I'm a casual Docker user, ran maybe 30 images my whole life.
| I've never used any of these flags and didn't know most of
| them even existed.
|
| Are these serious threats? I mean it seems like common sense
| that if you give a malicious container elevated privileges,
| it can do bad stuff.
|
| Is a VM any different? If you create a VM and add your host's
| / directory as a share with write permissions (allowing the
| VM to modify your host filesystem/binaries) does that mean
| VMs are bad at isolation and shouldn't be used? Because
| that's what these "7 ways to escaper a container" ways look
| like to me.
| belter wrote:
| Containers are called "Leaky Vessels" for a reason...
|
| "Container Escape: New Vulnerabilities Affecting Docker and
| RunC" - https://www.paloaltonetworks.com/blog/prisma-
| cloud/leaky-ves...
|
| VMs offer a much better isolation mode.
| gettodachoppa wrote:
| Thanks, that link made me much more confident in using
| Docker.
|
| I mean come on: _" Attackers could try to exploit this
| issue by causing the user to build two malicious images
| at the same time, which can be done by poisoning the
| registry, typosquatting or other methods"_
|
| So basically ridiculous CVEs that will never affect
| people not in the habit of building random Dockerfiles
| off Github with 2 stars. Good to know. Only the 1st one
| isn't dismissable out of hand, I can't tell if it's bogus
| like the rest./
| pjmlp wrote:
| Since Microsoft came up with WSL, I no longer have the need for
| VMWare Workstation.
|
| This is how products get killed.
| gettodachoppa wrote:
| I'm the opposite, I need these desktop hypervisors because
| Hyper-V is trash for anything but a WSL shell or server VM.
|
| I upgraded to Windows 11 for WSLg (figuring it would replace my
| Linux desktop), and it was buggy trash. You can't even get a
| high-resolution Ubuntu desktop (from Microsoft themselves,
| their own quickbox!) without jumping through hoops, searching
| all over reddit for knowledge obsoleted by the next update,
| tweaking arcane settings and running misc Powershell scripts.
| To say nothing of the occasional freezes.
|
| By enabling WSL2/WSLg, your Windows host is now a privileged
| guest running under Hyper-V as a hypervisor. Which means
| lightweight desktop hypervisors like Virtualbox run like trash.
|
| I ended up removing WSLg/turning Hyper-V off, using Virtualbox
| for desktop Linux, and using WSL1 (not 2) to have a quick Linux
| shell without enabling Hyper-V.
|
| I'm now considering Workstation due to the superior graphics in
| the guest over Virtualbox.
| trollbridge wrote:
| Have been a happy Fusion Pro customer for years, including buying
| upgrades. A user can install 5 seats which includes both
| Workstation and Fusion, so I could have it on my Mac desktop,
| iMac, and Linux desktop. The licence was very clear it is kosher
| for commercial use. And it was perpetual, no worrying about
| annual renewals.
|
| Beware the new "free" licence, which is emphatically not for
| commercial use. Get caught accidentally using the personal
| licence and your company will be on the hook to pay whatever
| Broadcom wants you to pay. Oracle did similar shenanigans with
| VirtualBox (watch out if you download the extension pack) and
| Java (watch out if you install a JRE on your desktop and use it
| to compile/develop certain software!)
|
| This does open a market opportunity for Corel/Parallels which is
| mostly at feature parity with VMware... the main reason I liked
| using VMware Fusion was solid integration with ESXi, which also
| won't be a concern anymore as with the Broadcom acquisition
| that's a platform I'll be trying to avoid.
| ganoushoreilly wrote:
| They provided the method for continuing to purchase the license
| (much the same way it was before with digital river). $120
| annually.
| andyjohnson0 wrote:
| I used to have (paid, personal) VMware Workstation licence, but
| switched to VirtualBox after they stopped updating Workstation
| and a windows update stopped it working. I thought it was a
| decent product.
|
| I'd rather not use an Oracle product (VB) but are there any
| advantages in switching back? Main use is running Ubuntu VMs on
| Windows.
| INTPenis wrote:
| This is probably the first step to shutting down development of
| these products.
|
| First of all every desktop now has its own mature virtualization.
|
| And secondly, Broadcom has no interest in this market.
| downrightmike wrote:
| Wonder how much tracking shit got crammed in recently
| AYBABTME wrote:
| Pro free for now, or Pro is free abandonware. Both cases
| discourage adoption.
|
| Open-source would help if there's any desire to keep it alive,
| otherwise this is a nice gesture but I would read this as a
| signal that I should stick away from it because it's dead or a
| trap.
| swarnie wrote:
| Who is spinning up home test environments looking for decades
| of support?
|
| My VMs are doing pretty well if they last the quarter.
| plorkyeran wrote:
| We have a whole bunch of automation built around VMWare
| Fusion for creating and deploying macOS VMs (for CI testing).
| The VMs aren't long-lived, but the code using VMWare Fusion
| certainly is and it's a nontrivial project to migrate to a
| different virtualization system. Thankfully for us we were
| already planning to do that migration before the acquisition.
| bzmrgonz wrote:
| MEH!!! qemu for the win! "Hardware Virtualization Support: Qemu
| is capable of running virtual machines without hardware
| virtualization support, also known as software virtualization. On
| the other hand, VMware Fusion requires hardware-assisted
| virtualization to run virtual machines efficiently."
| bhako wrote:
| Fuck me, i just drop it to use vbox. I migrated all my vms.
| oblio wrote:
| I love how many people just aren't reading the article.
|
| First of all it's both Fusion, the Mac software and Workstation,
| the Windows one.
|
| Secondly, they're making them free for personal use. They're
| still paid for commercial use and it's going to be a
| subscription.
| oblio wrote:
| Separate note: what do folks use to virtualize Windows on Linux?
| Is anything good enough to run older games in Windows in a VM?
| Think Dota 2 (I know it's available for Linux, just using it as a
| perf reference).
| m463 wrote:
| Proxmox can do this. It is free software. It will work best if
| you passthrough your graphics card. I also passed through a USB
| controller and used my dac for sound. You can run most versions
| of windows in a VM, also macos and linux.
| badrabbit wrote:
| I paid for it already lol. Should it not be "broadcom fusion"
| now? I am already getting emails about migrating my vmware
| account to broadcom.
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