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VMware Fusion Pro: Now available free for personal use

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171–178 of 178 posts

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

#171

Orbstack now serves 100% of my virtualization and docker needs on macOS. Hopefully I'll never feel the need to install virtualbox or fusion or parallels ever again.

Orbstack is really nice on an M1. But occasionally I run into the need for a GUI application and then I'm stuck. Is it possible to use Orbstack for that?

I haven't had that need, sorry. What applications?

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

#172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I moved the rest of my machines to proxmox as well. I had left one ESXI just for the hell of it but I just can't leave it running even with the free Workstation pro (i'll still use it on my workstations).

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

#173
Started as a Fusion user, then Parallels on the Mac. Then back to Fusion. Each Windows or MacOS update would break something.

Toggled back and forth maybe 5-6 times. Finally settled on Parallels and stopped upgrading Fusion. Haven't had problems since.

Glad it's free now, but that sometimes means the company is going to stop investing in it.

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

#174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Orbstack is really nice on an M1. But occasionally I run into the need for a GUI application and then I'm stuck. Is it possible to use Orbstack for that?

I haven't had that need, sorry. What applications?

A provider once gave me only a Java JAR graphical UI for an old Cisco VPN thing. I was on a Mac and it would only really work on Ubuntu. I used a different Ubuntu machine to get it going but would have liked to have done it on a virtualized Ubuntu. It did actually work on virtualized Ubuntu but I had to use VirtualBox and it was slow.

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

#175
post #127

I paid for it already lol. Should it not be "broadcom fusion" now? I am already getting emails about migrating my vmware account to broadcom.

>Should it not be "broadcom fusion" now? Given Broadcom's actions they need to rename it to "Broadcom fission" :-P

Good one!

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

#176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Am I the only one who explicitly does not want type 1 hyper visor on my desktop? Am I out dated? I like workstation and virtualbox because they're controllable and minimally impactful when I'm not using them. Installing hyper v (and historically even WSL - not sure if it's still the case but it was never sufficiently explicit) now makes my primary OS a guest, with potential impact on my gaming, multimedia, and other…

I used to worry about this overhead too but this appears to be nothing on modern CPUs. I had minuscule differences here-and-there on Intel 9th gen (9900K) but my current Intel 13th gen (13900K) has zero performance decrease with HV enabled. (At least on any perceptible level)

Thanks - can you share your usage patterns, what kind of usage, does it include heavy gaming and media?

Note, I'm less worried about percentage performance, as some things just not working well at all, because of assumptions of direct hardware access vs reality of running under hyper v. I.e. Are ALL hardware calls and capabilities 100% absolutely completely available once your main Windows install is running as a VM? Not most, majority, should be good; but actually, seamlessly all? My understanding was No, but things may have changed for the better.

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

#177
post #13

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?

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

ARM Windows seems to be able to run x86 apps, though. I use an ARM Windows on an M1 mac to run BMW E-Sys and it works well enough.

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

#178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 actual…

> "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. The nefarious part is that Windows enables Hyper-V even if you don't actually use Hyper-V VMs and never will. KVM doesn't take exclusive control of VMX…

> The nefarious part is that Windows enables Hyper-V even if you don't actually use Hyper-V VMs and never will.

It does not actually enable it by default but there are many settings or apps that can cause it to become enabled. Virtualization-based-security, WSL, container tools, etc. Providing a hypervisor and related functionality is part of what a modern OS kernel should do! It's not nefarious!

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