Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

VMware Fusion Pro: Now available free for personal use

blogs.vmware.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 178 posts

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

#151

Post by jen20 »

mschuster91 wrote: post #42
codetrotter wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder how common that is though. In terms of people who might consider Fusion you have: - People who only use Windows - People who only use macOS - People who only use Linux - People who virtualize Windows on macOS - People who virtualize Linux on macOS - People who run FreeBSD or similar on their computers - People who virtualize FreeBSD or similar on macOS - People who virtualize various operating systems on Win…

> I would guess that the people who develop for Linux servers would mainly use Docker if they run macOS, and that also relies on VM, but not using Fusion. x86 Docker on ARM Mac is an insanely complex setup - it runs an ARM Linux VM inside Hypervisor.framework that then uses a Rosetta client via binfmt that communicates with the host macOS to set up all the Rosetta specific stuff and prepare the client process to use…

There's surely no mystery as to how Docker is doing this:

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/virtualization/run...

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

#152

Post by ricktdotorg »

manishsharan wrote: post #142

Proxmox is completely free to download and deploy without any cost. For commercial and personal use.

my longterm homelab of ESXi 6.x on Intel NUC with unlimited license hack recently blew up (repeated power surges, no UPS). went with Intel NUC again but proxmox instead for the rebuild and its been a dream so far. i don't miss ESXi or Vmware in general one bit.

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

#153

Post by telgareith »

mycall wrote: post #133
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…

GPU-P is a pita to keep updated and is half baked. So many things just don't see or use the Nvidia drivers properly. If you want 60fps, Parsec is the only solution I found for desktop/mobile Nvidia graphics.

If accessing windows- look at enabling remoteFX, h264 hardware stream, with YUV444, in RDP. See: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/security-compliance-a...

Once I discovered that, I haven't looked at parsec. Moonlight/sunshine (whatever the pair is) is... terrible. And, When I was looking YUV444 wasn't a feature. Or, at least not one anybody actually knew how to use.

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

#154

Post by justinclift »

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…

Snapshot support in at least Libvirt based KVM still sucks. :(

As in, technically it supports snapshots.

But try have a tree of different snapshots of a VM based upon different points in time.

Super useful when doing integration work and testing out various approaches that evolve over time as things progress.

With VMware Workstation I've been able to do that for years, for Libvirt based KVM it's not even possible.

To be clear, I really wish it could be done in Libvirt/KVM too. ;)

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

#155

Post by gorkish »

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?

The use case is mainly interoperability with VirtualBox; they can still keep thier own disk/vm formats, guest tools, etc. and use HyperV as the 'virtualization engine'. Users that have workflows that call out to VirtualBox can continue to work; a lot of vm image tools (vagrant, packer) continue to work, etc.

But yes, of course you can also change your tools to use HyperV directly.

"Having to use HyperV" is not actually anything nefarious as the other comment seems to imply. You can't have two type 1 hypervisors running cooperatively on the bare metal and you cant implement your type 2 hypervisor hooks if you have a type 1 hypervisor running. So if you have enabled HyperV directly or indirectly by using WSL2 or installing any of the container runtime platforms (Docker Desktop et al) that use it, then you have to use HyperV as your hypervisor.

Note this is different than nested virtualization (ESXi on HyperV, etc.) which is supported but a completely different beast.

For the same reason you cannot run Xen and KVM VM's simultaneously on Linux (excepting nested virtualization).

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

#156

Post by justinclift »

ghaff wrote: post #47
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.

Pretty much all desktop virtualization/VDI/etc. products have been de-emphasized by essentially everybody except to the degree that they're a largely free byproduct of server virtualization. I doubt any company is devoting more than a minimal number of resources to these products--maybe Apple more than others. Red Hat, for example, even sun-setted its "traditional" enterprise virtualization product in favor of Kuvevi…

There are new VDI contenders still coming up though. This caught my attention recently (due to trialling Proxmox for another purpose):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLK_i-TQ3kQ

There's clearly still demand for VDI solutions too. A recent example:

https://forum.proxmox.com/threads/vdi-solution-for-proxmox.1...

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

#157

Post by mschuster91 »

jen20 wrote: post #151
mschuster91 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I would guess that the people who develop for Linux servers would mainly use Docker if they run macOS, and that also relies on VM, but not using Fusion. x86 Docker on ARM Mac is an insanely complex setup - it runs an ARM Linux VM inside Hypervisor.framework that then uses a Rosetta client via binfmt that communicates with the host macOS to set up all the Rosetta specific stuff and prepare the client process to use…

There's surely no mystery as to how Docker is doing this: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/virtualization/run...

Yeah that's a "how to use it in the simple case", that's not a "here is how this shit works under the hood so you can use it for more than just running userland processes" and it also doesn't state the limitations (e.g. what instructions are supported and which are not).

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

#158

Post by justinclift »

lostlogin wrote: post #23
ganoushoreilly wrote: post #2

I've mixed feelings on this. One side I love it's free, the annual pricing seems reasonable to what it was. On the other, i've been so burned by their pricing for everything else with clients that i'm reticent to be thankful. I suppose it's a step in the right direction, bringing back ESXI for homelab users would be a good step too.

> bringing back ESXI for homelab users would be a good step too. It would be interesting if they did. So many have now tried Proxmox and liked it.

Yeah. Once the Proxmox team fixed the recent kernel bug that caused migration hangs with Ryzen/EPYC hardware (~20% of migrations just hung), things have been pretty great.

Presently trialling a HA cluster with it, and likely to deploy that to a local data centre in the next few weeks.

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

#159

Post by gorkish »

mmaniac wrote: post #150
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.

Why is the Hyper-V backend so much slower?

In truth it's not; however if the software has to do extra things like, for instance, translate io calls to a virtualbox disk format that hyperv cannot natively support or do an extra memcpy on the video framebuffer to get their UI to work then there will be necessary performance impacts. How fast a guest os "feels" is mostly down to the performance of the virtualized devices and not necessarily the overhead of virtualization itself.

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

#160

Post by justinclift »

oblio wrote: post #122

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.

> ... and Workstation, the Windows one.

Workstation also runs on Linux. :)

As a data point for anyone else running it on Linux, this repo is probably what you should keep an eye on for updated VMware modules that work with newer kernels:

https://github.com/mkubecek/vmware-host-modules

The ones bundled in VMware Workstation officially tend to break in weird ways as new kernels come along. (!)

Post reply on HN