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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

#81

Post by gorkish »

rcarmo wrote: post #28
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…

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).

> 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 , 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.

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

#82

Post by darby_eight »

TylerE wrote: post #64
bombcar wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Can’t even run x86 Linux on Mac right now

qemu works as well as it always did—which is to say slow as hell but good enough for automation in a pinch

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

#83

Post by jareds »

whalesalad wrote: post #55
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.

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.

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

#84

Post by gorkish »

jhiesey wrote: post #39
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).

Agreed. Virtualized 3d acceleration in particular still has quite a bit of "secret sauce" left in it.

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.

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

#85

Post by darby_eight »

segasaturn wrote: post #48

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…

What is Visual Studio used for these days? Of course windows development, and I'm guessing xbox development too. Anything else?

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

#86

Post by gorkish »

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)

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.

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

#87

Post by netrap »

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…

If you want to pass through USB, SCSI, or something like that then VMWare Workstation is better than Hyper-V for sure.

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

#88

Post by haunter »

dist-epoch wrote: post #32

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.

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...

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

#89

Post by trollbridge »

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.

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

#90

Post by darby_eight »

whalesalad wrote: post #55
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.

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.
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