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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

#141

Post by TillE »

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?

It's probably the best C++ IDE out there, with a great debugger. For C# a lot of people prefer Rider, but in terms of free options VS is much better than VS Code.

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

#143

Post by pjmlp »

gettodachoppa wrote: post #113
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 upd…

If you are running Windows 10 with secure kernel, driver guard, among others, this features require Hyper-V.

Secondly Windows 11 doubles even more on having Hyper-V running for even more security capabilities.

I also think the future is type 1 hypervisors, and in regards to performance, my computers are beefy enough to hardly notice any major impact.

As for Linux configuration problems, business as usual, there is always something that needs hand holding, and I have been using distributions since Slackware 2.0 in 1995's Summer.

I also mostly used Virtualbox only when not allowed to use VMWare products, due to cheap project delivery conditions.

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

#144

Post by rekoil »

Stagnant wrote: post #115
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/

I had an expired trial license, after updating it now prompts me that my license is expired, but then seems to work just fine instead of closing haha. Thanks for the link!

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

#145

Post by pizza234 »

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…

> VMWare has not been selling many Workstation licenses to personal users (costing ~$300 each) and making the products free gives free advertising

Not really. The VMWare Workstation Player had the same engine (but less management functionality) so personal user could actually use a VMWare virtualization product. For basic usage (including snapshotting), which fits a non-commercial user, it was a fitting choice.

Therefore, it's good that they're essentially giving more functionality for free, but they did have a free offer before (for non-commercial users).

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

#146

Post by Peanuts99 »

AshamedCaptain wrote: post #94
gorkish wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 o…

> Even VMware Workstation and VirtualBox on Windows use HyperV under the hood if you have HyperV or WSL features enabled. VirtualBox is consistently (and significantly) slower when it uses HyperV as backend than when it uses its original driver, and many features are not supported at all with HyperV. In fact the GUI actually shows a "tortoise" icon in the status bar when running with HyperV backend.

What is the use case for using Virtualbox with Hyper-V? Why not just use Hyper-V directly?

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

#147

Post by dist-epoch »

gettodachoppa wrote: post #114
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.

If you want Ubuntu use Hyper-V Quick Create instead of booting the .iso you downloaded. That takes care of the integration things.

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

#148

Post by AshamedCaptain »

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…

> Sandboxing, and resource quotas / allocations / reservations.

But "sandboxing" is not a property of hardware-based virtualization. Hardware-based virtualization may even increase your surface attack, not decrease it, as now the guest directly accesses the GPU in some way software does not fully control (and, for many vendors, is completely proprietary). Likewise, resource quotas can be implemented purely in a software manner. Surely an arbitrary program being able to starve the rest of the system UI is a solved problem in platforms these days, otherwise Android/iOS would be unusable... Assuming the GPU's static partitioning is going to prevent this is assuming too much from the quality of most hardware.

And there is an even bigger elephant in the room: most users of desktop virtualization would consider static allocation of _anything_ a bug, not a feature. That's the reason most desktop virtualization precisely wants to to do thin-provisioning of resources even when it is difficult to do so (e.g. memory). i.e. we are still seeing this from the point of view of server virtualization, and just shows how desktop virtualization and server virtualization have almost diametrically opposed goals.

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

#149

Post by AshamedCaptain »

Peanuts99 wrote: post #146
AshamedCaptain wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Even VMware Workstation and VirtualBox on Windows use HyperV under the hood if you have HyperV or WSL features enabled. VirtualBox is consistently (and significantly) slower when it uses HyperV as backend than when it uses its original driver, and many features are not supported at all with HyperV. In fact the GUI actually shows a "tortoise" icon in the status bar when running with HyperV backend.

What is the use case for using Virtualbox with Hyper-V? Why not just use Hyper-V directly?

For a start, the list of operating systems Hyper-V supports is an order of magnitude less than what VirtualBox supports. Likewise for emulated hardware, like 3D as mentioned a number of times here. The GUI is also much better on VirtualBox.

And Windows many times forces HyperV onto you, taking exclusive control of the CPU's virtualization features, thereby forcing VirtualBox to either use Hyper-V as a (terrible) backend .... or not run at all.

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

#150

Post by mmaniac »

AshamedCaptain wrote: post #94
gorkish wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 o…

> Even VMware Workstation and VirtualBox on Windows use HyperV under the hood if you have HyperV or WSL features enabled. VirtualBox is consistently (and significantly) slower when it uses HyperV as backend than when it uses its original driver, and many features are not supported at all with HyperV. In fact the GUI actually shows a "tortoise" icon in the status bar when running with HyperV backend.

Why is the Hyper-V backend so much slower?
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