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VMware Fusion Pro: Now available free for personal use

blogs.vmware.com

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Re: VMware Fusion Pro: Now available free for personal use

#11

Post by lenerdenator »

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.

Re: VMware Fusion Pro: Now available free for personal use

#12

Post by [deleted] »

lenerdenator wrote: post #11

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. Ste…

[deleted]

Re: VMware Fusion Pro: Now available free for personal use

#13

Post by bombcar »

mickelsen wrote: post #3

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?

Fusion became basically worthless when you couldn't easily run Intel Windows on a Mac anymore because the underlying processor changed.

Re: VMware Fusion Pro: Now available free for personal use

#16

Post by bonton89 »

Shank wrote: post #5

I'm surprised they're making Workstation and Fusion free, given that they killed off the free ESXi/vSphere hypervisor. Seems strange?

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.

Re: VMware Fusion Pro: Now available free for personal use

#17

Post by stephenr »

bombcar wrote: post #13
mickelsen wrote: post #3

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?

Fusion became basically worthless when you couldn't easily run Intel Windows on a Mac anymore because the underlying processor changed.

... 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.

Re: VMware Fusion Pro: Now available free for personal use

#18

Post by justsomehnguy »

Shank wrote: post #5

I'm surprised they're making Workstation and Fusion free, given that they killed off the free ESXi/vSphere hypervisor. Seems strange?

What @bombcar said.

"Free" ESXi is.. well, free. They are converting enterprises to enterprise customers. Some bloke with WKS is not an enterprise customer.

Re: VMware Fusion Pro: Now available free for personal use

#19

Post by dlivingston »

egorfine wrote: post #15
BalinKing wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you elaborate? I don't know much about this space, so I'm struggling to see any downsides given that VMware is an established name.

Both products are rotten beyond salvation.

Wait, why?

Here's my list of virtualization solutions on macOS. I always thought VMWare was one of the best? (Admittedly I've only briefly used it)

- Parallels (the gold standard)

- VMWare Fusion (second place?)

- VirtualBox (haven't used it in ages)

- UTM (solid OSS solution)

- Docker

Re: VMware Fusion Pro: Now available free for personal use

#20

Post by bee_rider »

AshamedCaptain wrote: post #10
mickelsen wrote: post #3

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?

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.

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.

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