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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

#51

Post by Thaxll »

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.

Virtual box was never good, it always felt half baked.

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

#53

Post by ghaff »

bombcar wrote: post #8
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?

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 peopl…

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."

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

#54

Post by PaulHoule »

Thaxll wrote: post #46
gorkish wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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

#55

Post by whalesalad »

raybb wrote: post #43

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.

Fortunately the open-source VM space is the best it has ever been these days. No reason at all to use proprietary crap anymore.

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

#56

Post by xxpor »

zten wrote: post #37
rcarmo wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

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)

Do any of the commercial hypervisors do that today?

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

#59

Post by znpy »

Thaxll wrote: post #51
AshamedCaptain wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Virtual box was never good, it always felt half baked.

Years ago (pre-oracle) it was enough though: i have fond memories of using it with vagrant and be heppy.
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