VMWare Fusion and Workstation Pro now Free for Personal Use

[Output]

https://blogs.vmware.com/workstation...sonal-use.html

Credit to jonboy5000 on HUKD for pointing it out.

Also, while the VMWare page indicates you have to register for their support portal to get to the download, according to AzureMoon in one of the HUKD comments, you can just grab them directly from the update servers.

https://softwareupdate.vmware.com/cds/vmw-desktop/

Whether such a thing will last or is considered worth bothering with is another question entirely given how VMWare under Broadcom has been driving their customers away with huge price hikes according to reports online.

Either way, I thought it was worth pointing out here after seeing it on HUKD.

[g8ina]

OK, Im not up to date, what is this please, save me trolling thru google

[Ttaskmaster]

Virtual machine stuff.

[AGTDenton]

Lovely Jubbly

I should really give VMWare more attention to help paint the CV - but I'm content with a mixture of Hyper-V and Virtual Box

[ik9000]

this is not as good news as you might think. Firstly VMware is a lot better than virtual box, at least for my limited use scenario, I could not get VMbox to do what I needed it to.

Up until recently VMware was excellent, really looked after its customers, with sensible product offerings and perpetual licencing models. My paid perpetual VMware pro licence allows me to use it on three personal devices for example. It cost, what circa £180. And it's mine for as long as a I need it. Sensible EULA terms, no snooping, no ads, no data mining. It can be used personally or professionally. What they want with this change is for professional use to move to an annual subscription model. Goodbye perpetual terms. That won't really impact me but for a lot of companies that will matter. And also the force to use resellers rather than just going direct as before, with the loss of a clear pricing that offered. If the cost of perpetual licences is like for a lot of other products in the VMware range the price hike will be huge. You can read about the problems and resulting EU court cases here: https://www.theregister.com/2024/03/...cense_warning/ and here: https://www.theregister.com/2024/03/...adcom_q1_2024/ (notice that lovely phrase "focussing on upselling our customers")

Also see here: https://www.theregister.com/2024/04/...hing_broadcom/ as to why this is going to have a wider impact. Note broadcom openly say they are now just going to focus on the biggest 600 users who can't switch and stop caring about anyone else when it comes to product development and support. https://www.theregister.com/2022/05/...stomer_impact/

So all in all a well run excellent customer focussed company gets bought out by a scuzzy profit greedy megacorp and they do what they usually do and ruin it for everyone, staff and customers alike. Yey capitalism...

[AGTDenton]

Ah yes theres always a catch

I hadn't fully appreciated they were now owned by Broadcom. Honest & insightful of their plans, that may now explain why Virtual Box were hiring a DirectX specialist to maybe improve their Graphical capabilities, as that had always been weak and more recenlty lacking entirely.

I've used Virtual Box for the better part of 15 years now, none of my tasks have been graphical my use has been largely trouble free.
At work it allows me to utilise all sorts of scenarios.

When it comes to something that needs up time and multi access then I use Hyper-V.

[badass]

Lovely Jubbly

I should really give VMWare more attention to help paint the CV - but I'm content with a mixture of Hyper-V and Virtual Box

Don't waste your time with VMware for your CV. I say this as someone where VMWare tech in the mid noughties really helped my career. Broadcom have bought VMware and are going through their standard playbook. VMware as a company is getting utterly wrecked. Their solutions will not be relevant for most in the not too distant future.

If you're looking to get into infrastructure, cloudy stuff is the current fad and will likely remain so for a while. The current noise around AI is just that - noise. In a few years it will be clearer what actually works.

[Kumagoro]

I saw the free Fusion thing on Reddit and in the comments there were people saying that VM's are the past and it is all about containers like docker and kubernetes.

I don't really have much to do with VM's and the like nowadays. In the past I would have picked the basics up and have some awareness from people talking about it here. Such a shame what happened to hexus forums.

Anyway what is the difference?

[[GSV]Trig]

I keep thinking I should be looking at Kubernites, containers and the likes, but both VMware and Hyper-V just, well they're easy...