VMware Makes Workstation and Fusion Free For Everyone (bleepingcomputer.com)
- Reference: 0175458683
- News link: https://slashdot.org/story/24/11/12/2152228/vmware-makes-workstation-and-fusion-free-for-everyone
- Source link: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/software/vmware-makes-workstation-and-fusion-free-for-everyone/
> VMware has announced that its VMware Fusion and VMware Workstation desktop hypervisors are [1]now free to everyone for commercial, educational, and personal use. In May, the company also made VMware Workstation Pro and Fusion Pro [2]free for personal use , allowing students and home users to set up virtualized test labs and experiment with other OSs by running virtual machines and Kubernetes clusters on Windows, Linux, and macOS devices. Starting this week, the Pro versions and the two products will no longer be available under a paid subscription model.
>
> "Effective immediately, both VMware Fusion and VMware Workstation will transition away from the paid subscription model, meaning you can now utilize these tools without any cost. The paid versions of these offerings -- Workstation Pro and Fusion Pro -- are no longer available for purchase," [3]said Broadcom product marketing director Himanshu Singh. "If you're currently under a commercial contract, you can rest easy knowing that your agreement will remain in effect until the end of your term. You will continue to receive the full level of service and enterprise-grade support as per your contract."
>
> While the free versions will include all the features available in the paid products, Broadcom will no longer provide users with support ticketing for troubleshooting. Broadcom plans to continue developing new features and improvements and ensure that updates are rolled out promptly. "We're actively investing in new features, usability improvements, and other valuable enhancements," Singh added. "Our engineering teams are committed to maintaining our high standards for stability, with timely updates and reliable performance."
You can download VMware Fusion and VMware Workstation [4]here (sign-in required).
[1] https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/software/vmware-makes-workstation-and-fusion-free-for-everyone/
[2] https://tech.slashdot.org/story/24/05/14/203234/vmware-giving-away-workstation-pro-fusion-pro-free-for-personal-use
[3] https://blogs.vmware.com/cloud-foundation/2024/11/11/vmware-fusion-and-workstation-are-now-free-for-all-users/
[4] http://support.broadcom.com/group/ecx/downloads
Little late to the game here (Score:5, Interesting)
This might help the next generation of users, but Broadcom blowing up the VMware SME market with huge license fees has already done its damage.
Proxmox is free, uses KVM under the hood, and easily installed on commodity hardware. Gonna be hard winning back market share from that.
Re: (Score:3)
This. The hypervisor market is pretty much saturated. Even Microsoft has Hyper-V, and for those old enough to know the advantages, Xen is pretty f---ing effective with a regular Linux distribution as Dom0. (I don't recommend XenServer/XCPng, if you're thinking you need that, just use ProxMox instead, it's better supported, and those frontends don't actually take advantage of Xen's strengths.)
If even those options are "too hard", there's also VirtualBox. True, it's from Oracle, and that's a great reason n
Re: (Score:2)
xcp-ng is a fine server platform. You might get hung up on Xen Orchestra, since the maintainers of xcp-ng do so to sell licenses to it, but XenCenter is still there and working as well as it ever did. Proxmox isn't without its problems. You can't use the enterprise repository, and if that doesn't matter to you, then neither will the feature/operation difference between XenServer, Proxmox, and ESXi.
Re: (Score:2)
Proxmox and VMWare Workstation are two different products that do different things. Proxmox/KVM is (among other things) a server virtualization platform, and VMWare Workstation is a client virtualization application.
Re: (Score:2)
> "Proxmox is free, uses KVM under the hood, and easily installed on commodity hardware."
Proxmox is not the same "market" as VMware desktop (the topic of this article); which is using the host for most work and guests as just addons. The same market for that would be things like Virtualbox or Parallels, etc.
But you are right that we all knew VMware was toast once Broadcom got involved. They can't monetize most of the products, so they will just give those away now. And being closed-source and with no s
Too little, too late. (Score:3)
Too little, too late.
No one who doesn't absolutely need VMware will ever consider it again. This will prevent the student pipeline from dying entirely (like IBM allowed to happen with the iSeries), but no one "wants" VMware any more, and probably never will again.
ProxMox already has the features that maybe 90% of VMware users need, and I assume that they are flush with cash and hiring rapidly now.
Re: (Score:2)
I think 2014 was the last time I "wanted" VM desktop software that wasn't virtualbox. I forgot vmware was even a thing on the desktop. Containers erased most of the need to run "linux" on your windows or mac machine, and you can spin up windows machines on aws etc and RDP into them now.
Re: (Score:3)
If you're stuck in the VirtualBox loop and your main O/S is Linux, consider Proxmox. I moved from VB to PM and have never looked back. There are so many cool features in PM and its full-integration with Proxmox Backup (which does de-duplication by default) is a blessing. Plus it's so much faster than VB. And things scale up well with PM as well, such as failovers and things like that (which you probably wouldn't need if you're using it at home).
Re:Too little, too late. (Score:4, Informative)
Even if you want to run Linux on your Windows machine, wsl2 is built right in, and is about as seamless and low-setup an option as you can get. And for mac, there's already alternatives. UTM for free, Parallels for paid, etc.
Re: (Score:2)
100% correct. I'm already scheduling VMware to be ripped from my environment before my next maintenance subscription comes due. Once gone, there's zero need for any test or home training environment with an obsolete POS toolset.
This feels like a trap (Score:3)
Broadcom knows that they pissed off all of the small and medium sized businesses with their license fee increases, and many of them are jumping ship to other virtualization products like Hyper-V and Proxmox.
I guess that convincing developers and DevOps folks to keep making "free" VMWare VM's using these products is a good way to sabotage those migrations, by making more difficult to migrate those VM's to production.
Re: (Score:2)
That's how I see it, this is bait, they got greedy, users balked, and now they're trying to (partially) walk back. If they instead charged a fix license fee, I'd consider it, but this is not free beer, this is free lock in with the aim of (eventually) reimposing a subscription fee. The fact it's only free for "non-commerial" says it all. One little screw up and your company is on the hook for breach of contract and retroactive licensing with penalties, which I'm certain was built into the make-it-free equat
Unsolicited advice (Score:4, Insightful)
I use VMWare at home, because I used to support it professionally. I'll keep it until it breaks because it was free and I don't feel like replacing it.
Anybody who isn't in some way already invested and unable to escape would be a fool to get onboard with VMWare at this point. Don't start down a path with no future.
It's a trap! (Score:2)
Do not invest any time and energy into Broadcom products. They will just wait for a chance to screw you over. Instead go FOSS supervisors and you do not have to fear that.
Re: It's a trap! (Score:2)
Is having a FOSS supervisor like having RMS in your office chewing you out every few hours for installing a binary driver?
no thanks (Score:3)
Steering clear of broadcom and since their predatory licensing we are in the process of getting anything with the VMWare stamp on it out the door. I guess this is more trying to keep some of the grunts onside so that they may convince enterprises to pay the excessive licensing costs.
VMWho? (Score:2)
They really ceased to exist over a decade ago. who cares what conditions come with its corpse?
They still have one thing over everyone else (Score:5, Interesting)
VMware has the best graphics drivers for Windows guests by far. Like it's not even a competition, nobody else is even playing the same sport. So if you wanted to run a game in a VM for some reason (like for example nothing else will play it) then VMware Workstation being free is a marvelous development.
I wouldn't use it for anything that mattered . But if they supported modern kernels, I would use it for playing some weird Windows games on Linux, like perhaps Wipeout XL which I've never got to work under anything. Probably just better to emulate a Playstation though, to be fair.
Alternative download link (Score:3)
Download without sign-in: [1]https://www.techspot.com/downl... [techspot.com]
[1] https://www.techspot.com/downloads/189-vmware-workstation-for-windows.html
Re: (Score:2)
Fishy/broken
1) The url contains (MS) "Windows"
2) If you click on Workstation Linux, it then provides a ".bundle" file, which appears to be some MacOS thing?
3) If you edit the URL to be Linux:
[1]https://www.techspot.com/downl... [techspot.com]
then you still get the exact same page which gives that same ".bundle" thing.
[1] https://www.techspot.com/downloads/189-vmware-workstation-for-linux.html
It's dead Jim. (Score:2)
Although I still use VMware workstation pro for OS testing and migration, and this lets me do it for free now, all of the things that VMware had to make this easy got killed over time.
VMWare converter, arguably the best way to move from physical to virtual or even lateral from another hypervisor in a pinch, is dead.
Esxi free, which is where you would dump that server to in a pinch, is dead.
Vsphere essentials, one of the cheapest ways to run VMWare with support, is all but dead.
So realistically this move is
Good, now open source it. (Score:2)
Virtualbox is good, but the more the merrier. Don't switch to VMWare unless it's open sourced. Yeah I want things for free. You don't?
Re: (Score:2)
VirtualBox used to be good on the Mac, but they basically gave up supporting it once they migrated to ARM processors. Disappointing.