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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

#41

Post by kevingadd »

flaxton wrote: post #38

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.

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.

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

#42

Post by mschuster91 »

codetrotter wrote: post #25
stephenr wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... 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.

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 Win…

> 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 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.

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

#44

Post by fifteen1506 »

gorkish wrote: post #22
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?

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…

Worse, it's actively worse VMware on Windows vs Hyper-V.

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

#45

Post by packetlost »

gorkish wrote: post #22
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?

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…

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

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

#46

Post by Thaxll »

gorkish wrote: post #22
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?

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…

Hyper v doesn't have 3d acceleration, so if you play game or want to use linux desktops it's pretty bad.

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

#47

Post by ghaff »

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.

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.

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

#48

Post by segasaturn »

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.

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

#49

Post by bombcar »

codetrotter wrote: post #25
stephenr wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... 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.

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 Win…

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.

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