It's almost impossible to create an account with all of the delays. Even then, I got into a loop in "Trade Compliance Verification" which does not proceed.
VMware Fusion Pro: Now available free for personal use
31–40 of 178 posts
Re: VMware Fusion Pro: Now available free for personal use
#32On 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.
Re: VMware Fusion Pro: Now available free for personal use
#33I had purchased Fusion Pro recently due to the better graphics support in comparison to VirtualBox. I wonder what the catch is here.
Re: VMware Fusion Pro: Now available free for personal use
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
... I've had a Fusion licence since v10 was current (~2017) and I don't think I've used it to run Windows even once.
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…
What about people who virtualize various operating systems on macOS? That was my entire team at a prior engagement (at Microsoft, as it happens…). I suspect it’s a large number, developers tend to like macOS, so if you’re making a cross platform application and want to be able to test anything at all, you need a VM.
Re: VMware Fusion Pro: Now available free for personal use
#35My guess here: the product isn't valuable enough to sell off (see Horizon), the customers who buy the product aren't in their list of 600 accounts that they want to focus on, and the invoice price is a rounding error next to their enterprise offerings. Broadcom is bloodthirsty and I'd suggest they're doing this out of the goodness of their hearts but there is little evidence that they have one.
When they say "Free" what they mean is these products are now the walking dead. They are on maintenance only support until any existing commercial contracts expire at which point they will be cancelled.
In this case, I admit that I think it's the right thing to do. These products don't really need to exist as commercial offerings except for a few very niche cases.
Re: VMware Fusion Pro: Now available free for personal use
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
... I've had a Fusion licence since v10 was current (~2017) and I don't think I've used it to run Windows even once.
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…
The argument given was that VMWare became useless because of the switch to Arm.
There are more Hypervisor managers available on macOS now than there have ever been before - largely because Apple provides the underlying framework to do most of the hard work... but there is clearly significant demand to run VMs on Arm Macs still, regardless of whether that includes running Windows (which does exist for Arm too)
Re: VMware Fusion Pro: Now available free for personal use
#37Earlier 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…
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).
Yeah, if you care about 3D acceleration on a Windows guest and aren't doing pcie passthrough, then KVM sure isn't going to do it. There is a driver in the works, but it's not there yet.
edit: I made a mistake and got confused in my head with qemu and the lack of paravirtualized support. (It does have a PV 3D linux driver, though)
Re: VMware Fusion Pro: Now available free for personal use
#38Download doesn't seem to work. The VMware download area closed in late April, and can't seem to download Fusion now. The replacement store doesn't seem to be available yet.
I'm using Parallels and it is great on an Apple Silicon Mac, but I'm a long-time VMware Workstation and Fusion user, so I'd like to try it again.
Re: VMware Fusion Pro: Now available free for personal use
#39Earlier 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…
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).
Agreed. Virtualized 3d acceleration in particular still has quite a bit of "secret sauce" left in it.
Re: VMware Fusion Pro: Now available free for personal use
#40My guess here: the product isn't valuable enough to sell off (see Horizon), the customers who buy the product aren't in their list of 600 accounts that they want to focus on, and the invoice price is a rounding error next to their enterprise offerings. Broadcom is bloodthirsty and I'd suggest they're doing this out of the goodness of their hearts but there is little evidence that they have one.
When they say "Free" what they mean is these products are now the walking dead. They are on maintenance only support until any existing commercial contracts expire at which point they will be cancelled. In this case, I admit that I think it's the right thing to do. These products don't really need to exist as commercial offerings except for a few very niche cases.
It doesn't sound like they're trying to kill them, since they're moving commercial usage to a subscription license.
I'm not sure killing them actually makes a lot of sense - the products apparently share a lot of code with esxi, so it's two products for the R&D of one.