VMware Workstation Pro and VMware Fusion Pro now free for personal use

Steltek · May 14, 2024

Broadcom has announced that Workstation Player and Fusion Player are now discontinued products. VMware Workstation Pro 17 and Fusion 13 Pro are being released as free for personal use to replace them:

https://blogs.vmware.com/workstatio...-pro-now-available-free-for-personal-use.html

Now, obviously "free" is relative and TANSTAAFL applies (and especially with Broadcom, considering how they are such a pain to deal with and that you can't trust anything they tell you) so you'll probably be datamined out your rear orifice.

That said, to download you have to register in their support portal at the link in the blog. You do not have to complete a profile if it asks you to, just skip it for later. You have to be logged in to the support site, then click on the download links in the blog above. The first time you download, it will probably force you to complete a certification that you are a US resident and that you won't export the product out of the US before it will allow you to download (at least, it did for me anyway).

You can also find direct downloads for VMware stuff at the following link (you have to be logged in at the Broadcom support portal for it to work though):

https://support.broadcom.com/group/ecx/downloads

Jimminy · May 14, 2024

Who would want this when they could download virtualbox without all the hassles?

Steltek · May 14, 2024

Both have their problems. I simply prefer Workstation at this time for simple virtualization stuff.

igor_kavinski · May 15, 2024

Steltek said:
The first time you download, it will probably force you to complete a certification that you are a US resident and that you won't export the product out of the US before it will allow you to download (at least, it did for me anyway).

What does VMware have and other virtualizers don't that makes it a security risk to export?

manly · May 15, 2024

VirtualBox is an Oracle product. Friends don't let friends use Oracle stuff. Meanwhile Broadcom aspires to be just like Oracle.
I still have a soft spot for VMware, having used them since the original desktop 1.0 for Linux release.

Thankfully KVM is rock solid; and I've thought about playing around with Proxmox VE and GPU passthrough.

igor_kavinski · May 15, 2024

manly said:
Thankfully KVM is rock solid

Performancewise? Done any benchmarks against VMware/Virtualbox/Hyper-V?

Steltek · May 15, 2024

igor_kavinski said:
What does VMware have and other virtualizers don't that makes it a security risk to export?

Honestly, have no clue beyond the fact that Workstation has always been a closed source commercial product. It was also subject to export restrictions long before Broadcom bought VMware.

Oracle's branded commercial version of Virtualbox is also on the export restriction list as well. It may be that Virtualbox being open source (it has been, since 2007) in some way exempts it from export controls.

manly · May 15, 2024

igor_kavinski said:
Performancewise? Done any benchmarks against VMware/Virtualbox/Hyper-V?

I let the pros do benchmarks. Did a bit of searching earlier, and KVM is some "tens of thousands" of LOC while VMware (in totality) is many millions. Some sources (maybe biased) say that KVM is one of the best performing hypervisors, but VMware is no slouch and seems to scale a little higher. KVM is heavily used by some of the largest cloud providers, including GCE and AWS (historically they used Xen for compute).

Proxmox VE uses KVM for virtualization and this person says it beats ESXi in storage throughput:

[TUTORIAL] - Proxmox VE vs VMware ESXi performance comparison

Many discussions have compared Proxmox and VMware from a feature perspective, but almost none compare performance. We tested PVE 7.2 (kernel=5.15.53-1-pve) and VMware ESXi 7.0 (update 3c) with a 32 VM workload to see which performs better under load with storage-heavy applications. The results...

forum.proxmox.com

syadnom · May 20, 2024

friends don't let friends use diabolical corporate software and broadcom just converted vmware into that.

Xen and KVM are both faster than vmware. Vmware has been more about integrations and management, fitting better into corporate IT infrastructure. If you don't need tight integration like that, then vmware is the inferior product and has been for nearly a decade.

proxmox ve, which is KVM based, is fantastic for small setups. Single servers or small clusters. top-tier performance, good management, a fantastic CEPH cluster management for hyper-converged setups.

virt manager or any number of suites on KVM exist on your favorite linux flavor.

XCP-ng also fantastic but based on Xen. It's XenServer for those that think Citrix is evil. I find that it's configuration and management is a lot more convoluted especially if you need to recover a virtual machine but to each their own.

Ajay · May 20, 2024

Hmm, need to change my vmware login to broadcom. I was sent a link a while back - duh. Glad I didn't pay for the upgrade to VMW 17.

manly · May 22, 2024

In Broadcom's quest to become Oracle, they've lost a large customer after asking for a 15X cost increase.

The Register - It looks a lot like VMware just lost a 24,000-VM customer

igor_kavinski · May 22, 2024

manly said:
The Register - It looks a lot like VMware just lost a 24,000-VM customer

Time for the board to fire the moronic CEO!

manly · May 22, 2024

igor_kavinski said:
Time for the board to fire the moronic CEO!

Shareholders have done extremely well under the ~~Avago~~ Broadcom CEO over the past 19 years.

In 2019, Broadcom was announced the fifth best performing stock of the 2010s, with a total return of 1,956%.

VMware Workstation Pro and VMware Fusion Pro now free for personal use

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