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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

#111

Post by gettodachoppa »

belter wrote: post #79
throwitaway222 wrote: post #77

I mysteriously stopped needing vmware or virtualbox the year docker came out, I wonder why...

"7 Ways to Escape a Container" - https://www.panoptica.app/research/7-ways-to-escape-a-contai...

I'm a casual Docker user, ran maybe 30 images my whole life. I've never used any of these flags and didn't know most of them even existed.

Are these serious threats? I mean it seems like common sense that if you give a malicious container elevated privileges, it can do bad stuff.

Is a VM any different? If you create a VM and add your host's / directory as a share with write permissions (allowing the VM to modify your host filesystem/binaries) does that mean VMs are bad at isolation and shouldn't be used? Because that's what these "7 ways to escaper a container" ways look like to me.

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

#112

Post by belter »

gettodachoppa wrote: post #111
belter wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"7 Ways to Escape a Container" - https://www.panoptica.app/research/7-ways-to-escape-a-contai...

I'm a casual Docker user, ran maybe 30 images my whole life. I've never used any of these flags and didn't know most of them even existed. Are these serious threats? I mean it seems like common sense that if you give a malicious container elevated privileges, it can do bad stuff. Is a VM any different? If you create a VM and add your host's / directory as a share with write permissions (allowing the VM to modify your…

Containers are called "Leaky Vessels" for a reason...

"Container Escape: New Vulnerabilities Affecting Docker and RunC" - https://www.paloaltonetworks.com/blog/prisma-cloud/leaky-ves...

VMs offer a much better isolation mode.

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

#113

Post by gettodachoppa »

pjmlp wrote: post #80

Since Microsoft came up with WSL, I no longer have the need for VMWare Workstation. This is how products get killed.

I'm the opposite, I need these desktop hypervisors because Hyper-V is trash for anything but a WSL shell or server VM.

I upgraded to Windows 11 for WSLg (figuring it would replace my Linux desktop), and it was buggy trash. You can't even get a high-resolution Ubuntu desktop (from Microsoft themselves, their own quickbox!) without jumping through hoops, searching all over reddit for knowledge obsoleted by the next update, tweaking arcane settings and running misc Powershell scripts. To say nothing of the occasional freezes.

By enabling WSL2/WSLg, your Windows host is now a privileged guest running under Hyper-V as a hypervisor. Which means lightweight desktop hypervisors like Virtualbox run like trash.

I ended up removing WSLg/turning Hyper-V off, using Virtualbox for desktop Linux, and using WSL1 (not 2) to have a quick Linux shell without enabling Hyper-V.

I'm now considering Workstation due to the superior graphics in the guest over Virtualbox.

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

#114

Post by gettodachoppa »

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.

Anyone reading this, don't expect a smooth experience for desktop Linux under Hyper-V.

Hyper-V's team only cares about supporting servers. You're not gonna run a full-screen Ubuntu VM without a lot of banging your head against the wall, unless you spend days trawling random Github comments and reddit posts and fixing it whenever it breaks.

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

#115

Post by Stagnant »

dmitrygr wrote: post #52

Now go try to download it. All links are broken. https://knowledge.broadcom.com/external/article?articleNumbe... https://www.vmware.com/content/vmware/vmware-published-sites... https://customerconnect.vmware.com/web/vmware/downloads/info...

I spent like 15 minutes trying to find an official download link, even registered a broadcom account but that was a waste of time as well. Ended up finding a working download link from some reddit comment. It seems to contain all versions of fusion, player, workstation and remote console.

https://softwareupdate.vmware.com/cds/vmw-desktop/ws/

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

#116

Post by bzmrgonz »

MEH!!! qemu for the win! "Hardware Virtualization Support: Qemu is capable of running virtual machines without hardware virtualization support, also known as software virtualization. On the other hand, VMware Fusion requires hardware-assisted virtualization to run virtual machines efficiently."

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

#117

Post by gettodachoppa »

belter wrote: post #112
gettodachoppa wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a casual Docker user, ran maybe 30 images my whole life. I've never used any of these flags and didn't know most of them even existed. Are these serious threats? I mean it seems like common sense that if you give a malicious container elevated privileges, it can do bad stuff. Is a VM any different? If you create a VM and add your host's / directory as a share with write permissions (allowing the VM to modify your…

Containers are called "Leaky Vessels" for a reason... "Container Escape: New Vulnerabilities Affecting Docker and RunC" - https://www.paloaltonetworks.com/blog/prisma-cloud/leaky-ves... VMs offer a much better isolation mode.

Thanks, that link made me much more confident in using Docker.

I mean come on: "Attackers could try to exploit this issue by causing the user to build two malicious images at the same time, which can be done by poisoning the registry, typosquatting or other methods"

So basically ridiculous CVEs that will never affect people not in the habit of building random Dockerfiles off Github with 2 stars. Good to know. Only the 1st one isn't dismissable out of hand, I can't tell if it's bogus like the rest./

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

#119

Post by plorkyeran »

swarnie wrote: post #109
AYBABTME wrote: post #108

Pro free for now, or Pro is free abandonware. Both cases discourage adoption. Open-source would help if there's any desire to keep it alive, otherwise this is a nice gesture but I would read this as a signal that I should stick away from it because it's dead or a trap.

Who is spinning up home test environments looking for decades of support? My VMs are doing pretty well if they last the quarter.

We have a whole bunch of automation built around VMWare Fusion for creating and deploying macOS VMs (for CI testing). The VMs aren't long-lived, but the code using VMWare Fusion certainly is and it's a nontrivial project to migrate to a different virtualization system. Thankfully for us we were already planning to do that migration before the acquisition.
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