Live data from Hacker News

VMware Fusion Pro: Now available free for personal use

blogs.vmware.com

131–140 of 178 posts

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

#131
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

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

#132
post #22

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…

I would never use "performance" and "Hyper-V" in the same sentence.

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

#133
post #81
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They still need to. You are glossing over the fact that you need to provide device access, USB access, graphics, and a lot of things that are not necessarily provided by the "native" hypervisor (HyperKit does not do even half of what Parallels does, for instance).

> 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.

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

#134
post #79

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...

Those are all explicit privileges given to the guest. You can also "escape" from a VM if you give it access to the Docker daemon on the host...

It's like saying "2 ways to escape an unprivileged user account: 1. type su then the root password, or 2. convince the admin to setuid your shell"

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

#135
post #22

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…

Hyper-V does not have PCI passthrough and with that you lost me, while ESXi does. Also I want to test my multiplatform software on all major OSes (MacOs included) ESXi is then the only one that can run Darwin in parallel with rest.

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

#136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty much all of them do, though the platform support varies by hypervisor/guest OS. Paravirtualized (aka non-passthrough) 3D acceleration has been implemented for well over a decade.

However NVIDIA limits it to datacenter GPUs. And you might need an additional license, not sure about that. In their view it's a product for Citrix and other virtual desktops, not something a normal consumer needs.

Yes and no; you can use GPU partitioning in Hyper-V with consumer cards and Windows 10/11 client on both sides, it’s just annoying to set up, and even then there’s hoops to jump through to get decent performance.

If you don’t need vendor-specific features/drivers, then VMware Workstation (even with Hyper-V enabled) supports proper guest 3D acceleration with some light GPU virtualization, up to DX11 IIRC. It doesn’t see the host’s NVIDIA/AMD/Intel card and doesn’t use that vendor’s drivers, so there’s no datacenter SKU restrictions. (But you are limited to pure DX11 & OpenGL usage, no CUDA etc.)

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

#137
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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)

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

#138
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hyper v doesn't have 3d acceleration, so if you play game or want to use linux desktops it's pretty bad.

WSL2 seems to virtualize the GPU pretty well, I had an easier time getting my GPU to work for machine learning inside WSL2 than I have with plain Windows and Linux in the past.

It does, but it’s a whole rabbit hole of specialized settings from what I can tell. Toying around with GPU-PV in Hyper-V with a Windows 11 guest was complicated and ultimately had performance & compatibility problems. (With my previous PC even deadlocking when I used the onboard video encoder from within the VM)

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

#139
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).

quickemu is great for this

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

#140

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…

> Beware the new “free” licence, which is emphatically not for commercial use. Get caught accidentally using the personal licence and your company will be on the hook to pay whatever Broadcom wants you to pay

Common way to do this would be to keep an eye out for large fundraises, and then track back to see if you can catch them using the personal license early on.

Post reply on HN