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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

#91

Post by trollbridge »

kevingadd wrote: post #41
flaxton wrote: post #38

Download 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.

As a paying Workstation customer, I had to install it from scratch the other day and couldn't find a binary anywhere. I eventually found an old installer on archive.org (!) and settled for that. Grateful to whoever had the foresight to point the Wayback Machine at VMWare's CDN before it was too late.

And we paying customers did buy a perpetual licence. Better archive that download and save your key somewhere…

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

#92

Post by andyjohnson0 »

I used to have (paid, personal) VMware Workstation licence, but switched to VirtualBox after they stopped updating Workstation and a windows update stopped it working. I thought it was a decent product.

I'd rather not use an Oracle product (VB) but are there any advantages in switching back? Main use is running Ubuntu VMs on Windows.

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

#93

Post by wongarsu »

reanimus wrote: post #65
xxpor wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do any of the commercial hypervisors do that today?

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.

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

#94

Post by AshamedCaptain »

gorkish wrote: post #81
rcarmo wrote: 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…

> 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.

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

#95

Post by AshamedCaptain »

zten wrote: post #37
rcarmo wrote: 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).

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)

There has been a driver "in the works" for the past decade. Never coming. MS/Apple do not make it easy anyway.

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

#96

Post by AshamedCaptain »

Thaxll wrote: post #51
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.

Virtual box was never good, it always felt half baked.

My point is that at least their paid support fixed the things I asked them to fix; I cannot say the same of VMware where support was already non-existent a couple years ago (I stopped using them the moment someone here in HN said the entire Workstation staff had been fired and replaced with skeleton overseas crew, and this was way before Broadcom).

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

#97

Post by zten »

gorkish wrote: post #86
zten wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

KVM will happily work with real virtual GPU support from every vendor; it's the vendors (except for intel) that feel the need to artificially limit who is allowed to use these features.

I was mostly hoping qemu would get paravirtualized support some day, because it is leagues ahead of VMware Player in speed. Everyone's hopes are riding on https://github.com/virtio-win/kvm-guest-drivers-windows/pull....

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

#98

Post by DannyWebbie »

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?

Primary IDE for Unity and Unreal. Microsoft has been extending beyond Microsoft platforms, so I imagine a decent chunk of Visual Studio use is for cross-platform development.

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

#100

Post by AshamedCaptain »

gorkish wrote: post #84
jhiesey wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. Virtualized 3d acceleration in particular still has quite a bit of "secret sauce" left in it.

Today this is mostly implemented by having a guest driver pass calls through to a layer on the host that does the actual rendering. While I agree that there is a lot of magic to making such an arrangement work, it's a terrible awful idea to suggest that relying on a vendor's emulation layer is how things should be done today. Proper GPU virtualization and/or partitioning is the right way to do it and the vendors need…

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 version) or limited to specific CPU market segments, and already has ridiculous limitations such as a limit on the number of concurrent framebuffers AND framebuffer sizes (why? VMware Workstation offers you an infinitely resizable window, does it with 3D acceleration just fine, and I have never been able to tell if they have a limit on the number of simultaneous VMs... ).

In the meanwhile "software-based GPU virtualization" allows me to share GPUs in the host that will never have hardware-based partitioning support (e.g. ANY consumer AMD card), and allows guests to have working 3D by implementing only one interface (e.g. https://github.com/JHRobotics/softgpu for retro Windows) instead of having to implement drivers for every GPU in existence.

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