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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

#121

Post by oblio »

darby_eight wrote: post #85
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?

I'm guessing it's still the IDE of choice of game devs.

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

#122

Post by oblio »

I love how many people just aren't reading the article.

First of all it's both Fusion, the Mac software and Workstation, the Windows one.

Secondly, they're making them free for personal use. They're still paid for commercial use and it's going to be a subscription.

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

#124

Post by m463 »

oblio wrote: post #123

Separate note: what do folks use to virtualize Windows on Linux? Is anything good enough to run older games in Windows in a VM? Think Dota 2 (I know it's available for Linux, just using it as a perf reference).

Proxmox can do this. It is free software. It will work best if you passthrough your graphics card. I also passed through a USB controller and used my dac for sound. You can run most versions of windows in a VM, also macos and linux.

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

#125

Post by watermelon0 »

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

UTM supports Rosetta in Linux VMs: https://docs.getutm.app/advanced/rosetta/

OS still needs to be ARM, as far as I know, but you can then use Rosetta to speed-up x86_64 Linux binaries.

Docker Desktop also uses this to run x86_64 Docker images, and in many cases performance is quite close to the native ARM binaries, but this heavily depends on the workload.

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

#126

Post by Kipters »

darby_eight wrote: post #85
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?

AFAIK it's also the primary IDE for Sony and Nintendo SDKs

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

#128

Post by skissane »

derefr wrote: post #110
AshamedCaptain wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you say having a decoupled arrangement in software (which happens to be a de facto open standard) is a "terrible awful idea" and that instead you should just rely on whatever your proprietary hardware graphics vendor proposes to you? Why? And that's assuming they propose anything at all. Even GVT-g breaks every other Linux release, is at risk of being abandoned by Intel (e.g. how they already abandoned the Xen ver…

> So you say having a decoupled arrangement in software (which happens to be a de facto open standard) is a "terrible awful idea" and that instead you should just rely on whatever your proprietary hardware graphics vendor proposes to you? Why? Sandboxing, and resource quotas / allocations / reservations. By itself, a paravirtualized GPU just treats each userland workload launched by any given guest onto the GPU, as a…

Why does multi-tenant QoS require hardware-supported virtualisation?

An operating system doesn't require virtualisation to manage application resource usage of CPU time, system memory, disk storage, etc – although the details differ from OS to OS, most operating systems have quota and/or prioritisation mechanisms for these – why not for the GPU too?

There is no reason in principle why you can't do that for the GPU too. In fact, there have been a series of Linux cgroup patches going back several years now, to add GPU quotas to Linux cgroups, so you can setup per-app quotas on GPU time and GPU memory – https://lwn.net/ml/cgroups/20231024160727.282960-1-tvrtko.ur... is the most recent I could find (from 6-7 months back), but there were earlier iterations broader in scope, e.g. https://lwn.net/ml/cgroups/20210126214626.16260-1-brian.welt... (from 3+ years ago). For whatever reason none of these have yet been merged to the mainline Linux kernel, but I expect it is going to happen eventually (especially with all the current focus on GPUs for AI applications). Once you have cgroups support for GPUs, why couldn't a paravirtualised GPU driver on a Linux host use that to provide GPU resource management?

And I don't see why it has to wait for GPU cgroups to be upstreamed in the Linux kernel – if all you care about is VMs and not any non-virtualised apps on the same hardware, why couldn't the hypervisor implement the same logic inside a paravirtualised GPU driver?

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

#130

Post by senectus1 »

ganoushoreilly wrote: post #107
trollbridge wrote: post #89

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 accid…

They provided the method for continuing to purchase the license (much the same way it was before with digital river). $120 annually.

Controlling/watching for that in a large env is going to be a pita.
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