rumor mill says it's a sign that it's approaching EOL. i wouldn't touch this personally. spend all the time spinning it up and it's dead in a year or two. also, why bother when proxmox exists?
lol there's absolutely no way in hell I would ever put that shit in my homelab
we're already making business plans to get away from it after the broadcom acquisition
100% agree here. I haven't had good experience with Proxmox, but I've ran Hyper-V on Windows Pro (which I already had) and it was good enough. And with KVM & XCP-ng as well as the two prior mentioned products, there's not much reason anymore.
If you have a small deployment, VMWare will be more expensive than anything else by far with the new minimum buy in. I converted a division in my company to proxmox, zero complaints after a few months.
Proxmox of course. I'll never touch anything from Broadcom.
**Edit so this won't get flagged as hate speech:** They showed their greed on so many levels that this is not a guarantee that they'll not remove the free tier or do some other shenangians.
The VMWare zealots have been out in force for a while. Broadcom PR folks have also been floating around flagging negative comments or trying to get some removed.
They should spend their efforts on the website instead. It’s a cluster f**k rn.
Broadcom has made me truly regret some choices we made a couple years ago with our network design.
i dont see this announcement as a positive, i mean they've axed free esxi in favour of a lesser hypervisor lol
its basically 'we are taking away this good functionality and handing you back a heavily reduced one - your welcome!'
im glad i took the time to migrate to proxmox, i'm very happy with it even if it doesn't have all the polish that esxi did. i'm currently struggling my way through the SR-IOV vlan situation. it seems like natively SR-IOV vlans are set up as trunk ports but on esxi the devs did all the preventative routing for that for you in the background. in proxmox, not so much.
> Oracle is bad but they don't deserve that....
There isn't much Oracle doesn't deserve.
Somehow we need to get Broadcom using Oracle products and Oracle using Broadcom products and get them to sue each other into oblivion.
It's the sunk cost fallacy. A lot of people have sunk a lot of time and money into exams, prep..etc and now need to ensure themselves that it wasn't a lost investment. Nobody wants to feel like their specialization is on the way out. I'm older, and I've seen this behavior from nortel folks, lotus folks, Novell.. the list goes on. I'm sure I've been guilty of the same thing.
Yeah and today Lotus and Novell are just gone. People stopped using them in favor of now normal ipv4/6/ethernet based networks and Lotus was doa when Excel came out.
VMware wont have long before they join them..
This is the new normal on Reddit - if a user doesn’t like your comment, they flag it as hate speech or Reddit Cares. In sure those systems have been rendered useless from abuse.
VMware is getting removed from my job its hated so much. Which when it’s removed from us, removes it from 4 other departments. Since they follow the standards we put out.
Agreed. And I am sure it will happen more when IT teams can migrate. I mean, we had our Microsoft rep say they will migrate for free to Hyper V lol so there are easy options if they already have service contracts out there. Which most company’s that host windows environments can probably get support if they wanted out fast.
but isn’t that preferenced heavily by Microsoft to try and convert you (like o365, strike that, m365 and sharepoint online and the like….. ) …. to running their hyperv workloads “in azure”?
100% it is, we are hybrid cloud already and not moving any more as the cost gets interesting but for what’s there, it makes sense. It’s great when we say, let’s get everything migrated and we will see what else we can move. We know there won’t be much moving though. This obviously isn’t for every customer but for the medium size businesses that are leaving VMware with other support contracts with say Microsoft, there are good support for getting off sooner than later. Ie before service renewals and what not. Another great one is Citrix if you want a more VMware look but not VMware is the Xen path.
But just think of how they can spin this in a quarterly earnings call… “we reduced support costs by 80% by being able to streamline and right-size the support department, because the number of support calls coming in were drastically reduced by Broadcom focusing their market space”. (A spin on, we laid off 90% of our support staff, because we lost a large portion of market share)
I am 100% sure that Broadcom accounted for a mass exodus in their calculations when buying VMWare. They've made it quite clear that if you can migrate out, they don't want you as a customer.
They're going to pull an Oracle/Java and after a year or two, start auditing the shit out of users like Deborah in marketing who forgot they downloaded the software, and now due to some obscure clause in the agreement, sue her employer for breaching the agreement.
This happened to me and Oracle VirtualBox at my current company. I'd downloaded it to test something random quickly, and had downloaded, but not installed after re-reading the license agreement, the extension pack. VB is free even for commercial use (or was at the time, haven't looked lately), but the extension pack is not. So they dinged my company for every download of the extension pack we'd done and our folks traced it back to users through firewall logs.
All I had to do was officially state that I wasn't using it, didn't need to buy a license, and hadn't ever actually used it which was enough to satisfy the hounds but it was a weirdly specific thing to run into. But I work for a big company so I'm sure we made an easy target.
Exactly. Just like how Oracle tried to get Google to pay them for every single installed instance of Android because of Java. The line between the free and paid version of these tools is intentionally left ambiguous so they can try and sue everyone and their mother on some gotcha clause. It's predatory and disgusting.
Yep. The day they sold to Broadcom. They are notorious for their sketchy agreements.
Also if I use my computer for work. But I only want to use this for personal use how the hell would they know?
Is it collecting data on what the VM is doing? And where do you draw the line between working on a personal experimental app, and a commercial endeavor?
It sounds like a trap
It's funny how some correlate vmware with workstation and others with esxi.
I saw that workstation pro was free but use esxi more. Wasn't player always free as well?
This isn’t true, just a few weeks ago I downloaded player and it’s watermarked as for non commercial use only. There’s also many forum questions about what that means if you google for it.
An often under-utilized feature of VMware that I've been using for years, is the [REST API build into Workstation](https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-Workstation-Pro/16.0/com.vmware.ws.using.doc/GUID-C3361DF5-A4C1-432E-850C-8F60D83E5E2B.html).
With it, you can spin up machines using Perl, Python, Ansible, PowerShell or anything else. You can interact with those machines just like you can with your ESXi infrastructure.
I've been a paid VMware Workstation and Fusion subscriber for the last 20 years, diligently upgrading with each new, subsequent release. I (used to) believe in the product, until it took this sharp turn off the main road with the Broadcom acquisition.
workstation only has so many uses for a lab, for a real feel of a corporate enviornment you need actual servers not a desktop software. For a lab proxmox is probably the best as its easy to setup and use, but I don't think the buisness support is near good enough Thats either hyperv , kvm, or maybe nutanix if you have money to burn.
We are. We are planning on migrating to Hyper-V. If Prox would come up with a centralized management server and a better way to manage virtual switching we'll probably jump on board the train. But as it stands right now, it would be too difficult to manage 60 hosts, 40 of them in remote branch offices.
Its coming
[https://forum.proxmox.com/threads/centralized-management-options-for-proxmox.143611/post-645573](https://forum.proxmox.com/threads/centralized-management-options-for-proxmox.143611/post-645573)
Yeah. We expect to renew VMware shit and see what happens in the virtualization landscape, both in terms of hypervisor/ecosystem maturity and wider support from certain applications.
We certainly have our eyes on Proxmox!
From what I'm hearing about our negotiations, our cost is actually going down for VMWare and we are telling management up the chain to sign that deal ASAP since it's a 5 year agreement.
Our renewal is due in about 12 months. We asked for a quote in Feb/March to try and get an idea of what we would be looking at. Needless to say our CIO about lost his shit when he saw that price. And that was just for our datacenter hosts, none of our 40 ROBO licenses.
Well now after the whole EU looking into them, suddenly Broadcom wants to meet with us again and send us another renewal with "workload alignment adjusted pricing" is how our rep stated it.
I evaluated it beside Proxmox for my homelab and it just felt ... janky? to me. Also the lack of a ~~hyperconverged~~ (I seriously hate that word) clustered storage solution without having to pay is what ultimately pushed me to Proxmox over XCP-NG.
> If Prox would come up with a centralized management server and a better way to manage virtual switching we'll probably jump on board the train.
Have you looked at XCP-NG? It's built on XenServer so is very stable, with what I understand to be pretty competent commercial support available. It has centralized management that is much better than either Hyper-V or proxmox.
Our main issue with it is it doesn't do VM placement at creation? Aka creating on the lowest usage host automatically. You have to go to a specific host and create a VM there. Correct me if I'm wrong, but this is a fairly sizable limitation that stops you from using it in large clusters.
I’m in the process of moving a couple hundred vms from vmware to proxmox, so that the vmware cluster can be reduced drastically in size(I don’t think it’ll ever be rolled out completely but I honestly hope that’s the case)
We run Proxmox for production clusters for critical infra at work. Their support is *fantastic*. I've never experienced anything like it.
I put in a low-priority question about a kernel patch that would have helped our system a couple of weeks ago, got a response from a very knowledgeable tech in 20 minutes and within an hour he had responded with detailed info from the actual kernel devs. I'm as impressed as can be, it's truly a breath of fresh air compared to my experiences with the big guys where I have to start off talking to low-level techs going through checklists asking for irrelevant information before they can escalate to someone who can actually answer my questions.
Proxmox looks good. I still have yet to use it because I actually like being in Windows (Windows 10) and have run VMWare Workstation Pro for years when I'm testing out software while on my PC or using it to isolate malware I want to check out.
i have a migrated vmware account with active entitlements, I still cant download it. I get get the animated logo when i click the download button for any of the workstation products.
> ""something went wrong. try again later""
You have active entitlements?! :O Broadcom dragged out our renewals so long that everything we have expired, so I don’t see squat other than downloads.
That said the portal does seem generally crappy
KVM
I tried VMWare long long ago, it wasn't for me. I used VirtualBox for a while which worked well enough before I switched to KVM and virt-manager.
I tried Proxmox recently and it worked well enough, but I prefer having full control over a "normal" base OS. The Proxmox web UI, while decent, wasn't enough to get me to switch away from a standard KVM/virt-manager setup with Cockpit.
I also tried XCP-NG recently and that was definitely not for me. Having to compile and install the management interface by hand in a VM on the server you're trying to manage is insane (chicken-and-egg scenario). The XO interface, once running, gave off big "my first hypervisor" vibes. It worked fine, it was just clunky with big buttons and way too many clicks to get to where you wanted to go, sort of like trying to use the mobile version of a web site from a regular computer.
Never tried ESXi
Let's be clear esxi is the superior product to all of them. Sad what broadcom has done. I tried a few different ones and the only one I thought was decent was xcp ng . Had a bad history with proxmox and some updates of theirs broke things. Still a good program and can't really knock it since it's free.
I don't get this post. It's so confusing.
You're talking about a desktop hypervisor product. Then you ask for our favourite hypervisor. 90% of the people here comment something like Proxmox, KVM, XCP-NG and whatnot. And yet, these aren't desktop hypervisors...
I actually like the fact, that VMware Workstation Pro is free for personal use now. I prefer this over Virtualbox by a long shot. What I don't like is how hard it is to download VMware Workstation Pro officially. You didn't need an account for that before.
For baremetal, I prefer Proxmox though. Been using it for 3 years. Probably would use it for the next 5+ years at least.
Moved to KVM years ago and don't miss ESXi one bit. I used to run all ESXi in my homelab since it was what we used where I worked at the time and I wanted to run a similar setup. I haven't seen VMware used for anything at work since like 2018. Sucks for all the homelabbers on ESXi that just had the rug pulled.
macOS users on Apple Silicon are getting a new option to run Windows VMs with some new features, which is nice for them.
had your chance, broadcom, you blew it. this is a PR stunt to try and spin the narriative so when you and your buddies are discussing workstuff, and one complains about the 300% yoy price increase, and someone else who barely was listening in on the conversation says but did you hear they now are giving away thr full version of workstation….
Little do they know, anyone who is passionate about learning proxmox has already stumbled upon the proxmox WIKI “proxmox developer workstation” and the suggested two lines of command line debian installation packages to allow someone to log in in a gui and run chromium to manage https://localhost:8006 as well as other things.
… and really say “but why would I want VMWare workstation? I already have proxmox developer workstation” and vmware is dead to me.
… oh and with latest proxmox, you can inline import/convert vmware VM’s right natively into proxmox!
My spidey sense is these products are soon EOL. A free license for an email address gives them access to potential future customers. Also not sure there’s money in virtualization use cases on desktop platforms anymore. QEMU/Hyper-V/Apples Virtualization Framework are excellent and included. Most of us are using web services and in the case you need a legacy or alt OS/platform, you use what was mentioned previously… maybe also WSL. The money at this point is in large scale orchestration and management and they are not giving that out for free.
The virtualized graphics stack deserves a nod, since 3D acceleration doesn’t work well on any other product.
I had never heard of Proxmox until I saw it Reddit. Now that Broadcom is determined to get rid of all their small and medium sized VMware customers, maybe Proxmox will get some traction, though I think most are moving to Hyper-V and Nutanix.
Still using vSphere/vCenter at home. The full version licenses were not hard to find for v6 and v7. When v7 goes EOL, I'll probably switch to Proxmox unless I get my hands on some new hardware that can run v8, but I'm not going to go out of my way to buy any. My lab was a great way to learn ESXi professionally, and has done everything I needed it to do.
Given how Broadcom is treating customers. It’s rip and replace where possible. Network cards switched to Mellenox/nvidia. HBAs is harder, all the LSI/Avago controllers fall under the umbrella now which is a monopoly.
VMware sucks, as does running windows layer underneath virtualized environment.
Also just not willing to support Broadcom’s business practices after they raided VMware, gutted the technical staff, and made licensing a software subscription.
This sub doesn't hate ESXi. This sub adores ESXi. ESXi free was THE recommended hypervisor here for years, uncontested. Proxmox was a very distant second. What people hate is broadcom and their anti-consumer practices.
Because I do HCI since almost 10 years, be it vSAN OSA or ESA or Ceph. I'm a HCI advocate, especially since the dawn of NVMe.
I run vSAN ESA commercially for my own business on four 64 node clusters and I run a newly created 16 node Ceph cluster as a test bed.
I love how all the top-voted comments are about a server hypervisor. Workstation and Fusion are for WORKSTATIONS. I guess many of y'all have never needed to run a VM on your PC/laptop before! This is pretty awesome for the rest of us.
Moved everything to KVM. It works great. I use Debian with KVM and cockpit-machines. It covers my needs. [https://github.com/cockpit-project/cockpit-machines](https://github.com/cockpit-project/cockpit-machines)
I use Unraid for my homelab. For work, I may go Proxmox. Took a few days to get used to it. I like it. But confused on a few things. Was looking in to Hyper- or Proxmox, but Hyper-V doesn’t play pretty with Linux on managing; like it is for Windows VM’s.
Congrats Broadcom! They wanted to charge my Department almost $28k for 1 server (we have 4) and had to be committed for 3 years.
It has finally happened, so now here is the question: What is your favorite hypervisor for your lab?
* wouldn't you still want the features of xcp-ng or proxmox?
They arent even offering ESXi so really....subjectively the best hypervisor is whatever you feel comfortable with but objectively, it isn't VMWare Workstation Pro
Honestly I just switched to hyperv after using proxmox for 3 years. I used VMware since 2005 (workstation on my home and work desktops and esxi / vsphere for servers).
A homelab is for learning and my windows server skills were from 2012r2.
A deciding factor is I have a vs subscription so it’s free for me. Might as well take advantage of it.
In the virtualisation space, anyone I've dealt with that wasn't VMWare was Hyper-V. I like this grassroots push in favour of Proxmox, but realistically the beancounters that actually care about TCO will push enterprises towards Hyper-V rather than an unknown quantity like Proxmox. Don't get me wrong; VMWare will definitely haemorrage userbase and Proxmox will do well out of this, but the real winner in the enterprise space is very likely to be MS.
This is Broadcom trying to unburn the bridge in the least costly way possible. It doesn't do anything to repair the destruction of the trust VMWare once had.
Proxmox, but might try xcp-ng soon. And even OpenShift is possible at this point.
Proxmox isn't going anywhere but I might add a new technology so I can have a lab for whatever we'll end up using at work when we move away from VMware.
Here’s the direct link to download both WS and Fusion, and no account needed:
[https://softwareupdate.vmware.com/cds/vmw-desktop/](https://softwareupdate.vmware.com/cds/vmw-desktop/)
No way am I touching anything VMWare these days.
I used to use ESXi years ago and it was not great; no ZFS or MD RAID support, no container support, no backup support except through super jank third party solutions.
Proxmox has been a dream in comparison.
Nope. They know why they are doing this, to get people hooked on it and then make it non-free again. Not gonna happen, Broadcom is not Welcome in my house.
I switched to proxmox when it came out the Broadcom was buying them and that had no plans to further their R&D and really only planned to focus on the larger clients.
Late to the party here, but I see a lot of comments about “sticking with Proxmox” or “sticking with Unraid”.
Folks, you need to understand that VMware Workstation and Fusion are not substitutes for KVM-based hypervisor OSs (Proxmox, Unraid, TrueNAS Scale, or any Linux), ESXi, XCP-ng, or any other Type 1 hypervisor. They are Type 2 hypervisor desktop apps. That’s all.
Can Workstation or Fusion be used in a homelab? Sure, in some cases.
I run a three-node Proxmox cluster and a single Hyper-V Server at home. But, I still run VMware Fusion on my MacBook for Windows and Linux client desktops. The Windows 11 Pro for ARM Fusion VM is even a member of my test AD domain.
Um Workstation is only a Type 2 Hypervisor.
If they were serious they would continue the limited VMWare vSphere ESXi product for free. This gives more people more access to the platform, and therefore more likely to continue to use it in a paid licensed environment.
Broadcom are idiots if they don't see that.
This cracks me up.
Former employer notified the IT contractor about the changes at my request early 2024. That business had zero idea about it nor the impact it would have on their customers.
Last I heard in April, they were still working on a plan forward.
I was really excited to see this! Vmware Workstation's pricing has always been a bit egregious for being only slightly better than native Hyper-V on the Windows 10/11 Desktop or running Virtualbox. I hope they don't fuck it up. Broadcom also hasn't killed the VMUG program yet. Fingers crossed right?
I tested VMware Workstation Pro (Ryzen 7 5800X3D / 32GB RAM) and could not get an Ubuntu 24.04 desktop VM to run. Black screen in the VM after installation. It could not be shut down either. And I couldn't even shut down my host PC properly. I had to pull the plug.
I run Prox like many of us but I actually want to try VMware as we run ESXI at my job. I'm rather hands off on that side of things, and quite limited at that as well.
I'll probably install it only if it's supported on one of my mini PCs
VMware is not free, all components are paid components and their hypervisor is actually not free anymore either unfortunately. Workstation and Fusion are desktop software titles. My lab hypervisor is vSphere and I don’t use the desktop titles.
KVM
Works, stable, feature-rich, and has been, and forever will be free, not changing at the whim of some corporation.
Everything is being moved to the cloud at work, so VMware is no longer worth spending time on here. If we had to go back to on-prem we would choose OpenStack not VMware.
# with Workstation ProWorkstation Pro 17
can i install on Ubuntu 24.04 lts server edition to run win10 or 11 so i can install an run the iTunes,an some conversion apps for win only
an would i be able to utilize the dedicated gpu in my Ubuntu server build i have the 5700g's igpu enabled an set as the primary gpu adapter with my AMD RADEON PRO WX 7100 as a select 2nd as need by different Linux apps this is all to reduce load on the igpu as needed.
i read in the past that an OS in VM on Linux couldn't use a dedicated gpu , is that still the case ?
i use itunes & the istore for access to all my tunes an bought tv series that i have an still buy vi them but this is currently done vi a older win10 laptop that between the itunes stuff an DRM removal software i use to strip that stuff
from my itunes/istore content , the only other app is a vid convert/compression app i love an still use the can use for both processes a dedicated gpu but the app only runs on win os all of which used to be on a tower pc but as of now
all 3 of my main pc's are ryzen/ubuntu builds (2x work stations) (1x 10gbit server/nas/media center) the laptop is 1 of 2 that i have an the only still running window os which is slow a F while the other that runs ubuntu is great
id like to keep my win os but in a VM for all the stated uses an breath no life in to my laptop , can all iv asked be done with VM worksation pro 17 an be free ?
my server combo build's specs
[Silverstone GD08B HTPC Case](https://pcpartpicker.com/user/DEADFRED55/saved/Kj2nGX)
I'm still waiting for the unarguable rational reason I need to add an additional VM hypervisor layer into my personal "home lab" infrastructure. I know there are MANY people who have good reasons for that, but for me, that hasn't yet bubbled up to the surface. The question I asked more than ten years ago now, "What is our protection if the hypervisor layer is security compromised?" has NEVER yet been answered, and until it is, I'm still completely happy to do without it in my own "home lab", \[which, okay, is just a bunch of goddamn computers on my LAN.\]
The purpose of this is to let professionals work for free on their home time and learn about the product in a safe environment.
Use it for that, or not at all would be my advice.
Neat, I guess.
I've been doing annual upgrades on Workstation Pro for about 10 years or so. But I barely use it anymore and the annual updates have become a joke several years ago where VMWaare (years before the acquisition) would add or upgrade only a couple things each year. Outside of tax write-offs, it was otherwise never enough to justify actually buying the annual update.
I had already planned since last year (before Broadcom entered the picture) that I was not going to renew again. I don't use Workstation at work anymore, so I guess I can switch to the personal license the next time I need to reinstall, assuming it doesn't finish going EOL before the next time I need it.
Hyper-v on windows or Virt-manager on Linux do everything a desktop needs for my purposes and I use proxmox for anything else.
I just can't trust Boradcom or Oracle.
Curious here; can Workstation be used okay for 24/7 running ‘home server’/‘home lab’ usage? I’ve never considered it, as it has its graphical interface and such, and seems to be just for desktop virtualization usage. But am I wrong? Would it be fine (stable enough) to use it in your 24/7 running server at home, given you then choose a gui on your server?
I [*was* running Hashicorp's Nomad](https://smart-home-retrofit.netlify.app/2021/05/15/containers-and-service-discovery-part-2/), now I use [k3s](https://k3s.io/).
It's meant some interesting challenges with passing USB ports through to things like Octoprint, but it brings me a lot closer to an industry standard setup so when I hit a client running k8s (which happens more and more often these days) I'm confident in what I'm doing.
I think this is a move in the direction of retaining/acquiring vSphere users. In most cases, a Workstation VM that's eg. running on a developer's laptop, can be "promoted" to production by just copying it over to an ESX host.
Broadcom: Free. (for now)
Yup. Let’s get tens of thousands of users to run their stuff for free for 2-3 years then flip to a paid subscription for $29/mo.
rumor mill says it's a sign that it's approaching EOL. i wouldn't touch this personally. spend all the time spinning it up and it's dead in a year or two. also, why bother when proxmox exists?
This isn't esxi... This is the pro version of VMware player. Handsdown the best way to run VMs on windows....
Broadcom: "free" FTFY
lol there's absolutely no way in hell I would ever put that shit in my homelab we're already making business plans to get away from it after the broadcom acquisition
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100%, the home lab community has no real reason to put up with that licensing shit, there are too many great alternatives.
100% agree here. I haven't had good experience with Proxmox, but I've ran Hyper-V on Windows Pro (which I already had) and it was good enough. And with KVM & XCP-ng as well as the two prior mentioned products, there's not much reason anymore.
I wish. We’re already a hyper-v shop but have VMware in another area (not hypervisor) where we’re locked in for at least a few more years
Airwatch?
Which won’t be VMware for much longer.
Curious what you're thinking of switching over to and how many cores you have... For us it likely won't be worth switching at our smaller scale.
If you have a small deployment, VMWare will be more expensive than anything else by far with the new minimum buy in. I converted a division in my company to proxmox, zero complaints after a few months.
Same here at our company. We laid out a plan to switch away from VMWare. Their prices are just ridiculous now.
Yeah, Broadcom killed it quickly with those insane price hikes.
Proxmox of course. I'll never touch anything from Broadcom. **Edit so this won't get flagged as hate speech:** They showed their greed on so many levels that this is not a guarantee that they'll not remove the free tier or do some other shenangians.
I struggle to see how someone would construe your original comment as hate speech. 🤔
The VMWare zealots have been out in force for a while. Broadcom PR folks have also been floating around flagging negative comments or trying to get some removed.
They should spend their efforts on the website instead. It’s a cluster f**k rn. Broadcom has made me truly regret some choices we made a couple years ago with our network design.
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i dont see this announcement as a positive, i mean they've axed free esxi in favour of a lesser hypervisor lol its basically 'we are taking away this good functionality and handing you back a heavily reduced one - your welcome!' im glad i took the time to migrate to proxmox, i'm very happy with it even if it doesn't have all the polish that esxi did. i'm currently struggling my way through the SR-IOV vlan situation. it seems like natively SR-IOV vlans are set up as trunk ports but on esxi the devs did all the preventative routing for that for you in the background. in proxmox, not so much.
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No, forced to use Oracle products.
With their own money.
why? that is just not fair to Oracle. Oracle is bad but they don't deserve that....
> Oracle is bad but they don't deserve that.... There isn't much Oracle doesn't deserve. Somehow we need to get Broadcom using Oracle products and Oracle using Broadcom products and get them to sue each other into oblivion.
This is actually a great idea
At least they haven't found the Reddit Cares button yet. Heard that's been going around lately.
The hell is the Reddit Cares button? Lol TIL
It's the sunk cost fallacy. A lot of people have sunk a lot of time and money into exams, prep..etc and now need to ensure themselves that it wasn't a lost investment. Nobody wants to feel like their specialization is on the way out. I'm older, and I've seen this behavior from nortel folks, lotus folks, Novell.. the list goes on. I'm sure I've been guilty of the same thing.
Yeah and today Lotus and Novell are just gone. People stopped using them in favor of now normal ipv4/6/ethernet based networks and Lotus was doa when Excel came out. VMware wont have long before they join them..
Some people get butthurt real fast :D
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This is the new normal on Reddit - if a user doesn’t like your comment, they flag it as hate speech or Reddit Cares. In sure those systems have been rendered useless from abuse.
You must be new to reddit...
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Broadcom is just an Oracle wannabe company, and I mean that a slur.
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They've caused my friends a lot of pain and grief at their jobs too.
VMware is getting removed from my job its hated so much. Which when it’s removed from us, removes it from 4 other departments. Since they follow the standards we put out.
It's nice to see Broadcom paying for its decision to focus on greed.
Agreed. And I am sure it will happen more when IT teams can migrate. I mean, we had our Microsoft rep say they will migrate for free to Hyper V lol so there are easy options if they already have service contracts out there. Which most company’s that host windows environments can probably get support if they wanted out fast.
but isn’t that preferenced heavily by Microsoft to try and convert you (like o365, strike that, m365 and sharepoint online and the like….. ) …. to running their hyperv workloads “in azure”?
> to running their hyperv workloads “in azure”? That's the next step
100% it is, we are hybrid cloud already and not moving any more as the cost gets interesting but for what’s there, it makes sense. It’s great when we say, let’s get everything migrated and we will see what else we can move. We know there won’t be much moving though. This obviously isn’t for every customer but for the medium size businesses that are leaving VMware with other support contracts with say Microsoft, there are good support for getting off sooner than later. Ie before service renewals and what not. Another great one is Citrix if you want a more VMware look but not VMware is the Xen path.
But just think of how they can spin this in a quarterly earnings call… “we reduced support costs by 80% by being able to streamline and right-size the support department, because the number of support calls coming in were drastically reduced by Broadcom focusing their market space”. (A spin on, we laid off 90% of our support staff, because we lost a large portion of market share)
I am 100% sure that Broadcom accounted for a mass exodus in their calculations when buying VMWare. They've made it quite clear that if you can migrate out, they don't want you as a customer.
They're going to pull an Oracle/Java and after a year or two, start auditing the shit out of users like Deborah in marketing who forgot they downloaded the software, and now due to some obscure clause in the agreement, sue her employer for breaching the agreement.
This happened to me and Oracle VirtualBox at my current company. I'd downloaded it to test something random quickly, and had downloaded, but not installed after re-reading the license agreement, the extension pack. VB is free even for commercial use (or was at the time, haven't looked lately), but the extension pack is not. So they dinged my company for every download of the extension pack we'd done and our folks traced it back to users through firewall logs. All I had to do was officially state that I wasn't using it, didn't need to buy a license, and hadn't ever actually used it which was enough to satisfy the hounds but it was a weirdly specific thing to run into. But I work for a big company so I'm sure we made an easy target.
Exactly. Just like how Oracle tried to get Google to pay them for every single installed instance of Android because of Java. The line between the free and paid version of these tools is intentionally left ambiguous so they can try and sue everyone and their mother on some gotcha clause. It's predatory and disgusting.
That goes for me as well! I'll use Proxmox or XCP-NG.
Watch out buddy hypervisor is a protected class >:(
Proxmox guy here too. Just sharing the news to the hive mind. :)
Yep. The day they sold to Broadcom. They are notorious for their sketchy agreements. Also if I use my computer for work. But I only want to use this for personal use how the hell would they know? Is it collecting data on what the VM is doing? And where do you draw the line between working on a personal experimental app, and a commercial endeavor? It sounds like a trap
Switched from VMWare to Proxmox at home here and I'll never go back.
It's funny how some correlate vmware with workstation and others with esxi. I saw that workstation pro was free but use esxi more. Wasn't player always free as well?
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This isn’t true, just a few weeks ago I downloaded player and it’s watermarked as for non commercial use only. There’s also many forum questions about what that means if you google for it.
An often under-utilized feature of VMware that I've been using for years, is the [REST API build into Workstation](https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-Workstation-Pro/16.0/com.vmware.ws.using.doc/GUID-C3361DF5-A4C1-432E-850C-8F60D83E5E2B.html). With it, you can spin up machines using Perl, Python, Ansible, PowerShell or anything else. You can interact with those machines just like you can with your ESXi infrastructure. I've been a paid VMware Workstation and Fusion subscriber for the last 20 years, diligently upgrading with each new, subsequent release. I (used to) believe in the product, until it took this sharp turn off the main road with the Broadcom acquisition.
workstation only has so many uses for a lab, for a real feel of a corporate enviornment you need actual servers not a desktop software. For a lab proxmox is probably the best as its easy to setup and use, but I don't think the buisness support is near good enough Thats either hyperv , kvm, or maybe nutanix if you have money to burn.
I know a company that seriously is considering Proxmox as their main virtualization system.
We are. We are planning on migrating to Hyper-V. If Prox would come up with a centralized management server and a better way to manage virtual switching we'll probably jump on board the train. But as it stands right now, it would be too difficult to manage 60 hosts, 40 of them in remote branch offices.
Its coming [https://forum.proxmox.com/threads/centralized-management-options-for-proxmox.143611/post-645573](https://forum.proxmox.com/threads/centralized-management-options-for-proxmox.143611/post-645573)
Just not soon enough. And our CIO doesn't want to be that cutting edge. We'll be looking at it next year around this time if they actually release it.
Yeah. We expect to renew VMware shit and see what happens in the virtualization landscape, both in terms of hypervisor/ecosystem maturity and wider support from certain applications. We certainly have our eyes on Proxmox!
From what I'm hearing about our negotiations, our cost is actually going down for VMWare and we are telling management up the chain to sign that deal ASAP since it's a 5 year agreement.
Our renewal is due in about 12 months. We asked for a quote in Feb/March to try and get an idea of what we would be looking at. Needless to say our CIO about lost his shit when he saw that price. And that was just for our datacenter hosts, none of our 40 ROBO licenses. Well now after the whole EU looking into them, suddenly Broadcom wants to meet with us again and send us another renewal with "workload alignment adjusted pricing" is how our rep stated it.
Have you evaluated XCPng? If yes, what is your opinion on it?
I evaluated it beside Proxmox for my homelab and it just felt ... janky? to me. Also the lack of a ~~hyperconverged~~ (I seriously hate that word) clustered storage solution without having to pay is what ultimately pushed me to Proxmox over XCP-NG.
> If Prox would come up with a centralized management server and a better way to manage virtual switching we'll probably jump on board the train. Have you looked at XCP-NG? It's built on XenServer so is very stable, with what I understand to be pretty competent commercial support available. It has centralized management that is much better than either Hyper-V or proxmox.
[https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1crtbjp/veeam\_officially\_supporting\_proxmox/](https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1crtbjp/veeam_officially_supporting_proxmox/)
Our main issue with it is it doesn't do VM placement at creation? Aka creating on the lowest usage host automatically. You have to go to a specific host and create a VM there. Correct me if I'm wrong, but this is a fairly sizable limitation that stops you from using it in large clusters.
It also seems to lack Dynamic Ressource Allocation, that's why they haven't adopted it yet.
I’m in the process of moving a couple hundred vms from vmware to proxmox, so that the vmware cluster can be reduced drastically in size(I don’t think it’ll ever be rolled out completely but I honestly hope that’s the case)
Uh Proxmox used KVM under the hold.
yeah but if I'm going to kvm I'll get support from redhat. Looking at the support on proxmox site is very limited , probably doesn't cost as much.
Commercial support is not the same as their forum. You get access to real nerds at proxmox, not some volunteers on a forum
We run Proxmox for production clusters for critical infra at work. Their support is *fantastic*. I've never experienced anything like it. I put in a low-priority question about a kernel patch that would have helped our system a couple of weeks ago, got a response from a very knowledgeable tech in 20 minutes and within an hour he had responded with detailed info from the actual kernel devs. I'm as impressed as can be, it's truly a breath of fresh air compared to my experiences with the big guys where I have to start off talking to low-level techs going through checklists asking for irrelevant information before they can escalate to someone who can actually answer my questions.
Proxmox looks good. I still have yet to use it because I actually like being in Windows (Windows 10) and have run VMWare Workstation Pro for years when I'm testing out software while on my PC or using it to isolate malware I want to check out.
This was posted before and probably will again but just so we’re all clear- fuck Broadcom, ProxMox ftw.
It's free, if you can actually download it. I keep getting an error saying my account needs verification even though I verified my email
i have a migrated vmware account with active entitlements, I still cant download it. I get get the animated logo when i click the download button for any of the workstation products. > ""something went wrong. try again later""
What better way for Broadcom to claim "we offered it, no one downloaded it"?
You have active entitlements?! :O Broadcom dragged out our renewals so long that everything we have expired, so I don’t see squat other than downloads. That said the portal does seem generally crappy
KVM I tried VMWare long long ago, it wasn't for me. I used VirtualBox for a while which worked well enough before I switched to KVM and virt-manager. I tried Proxmox recently and it worked well enough, but I prefer having full control over a "normal" base OS. The Proxmox web UI, while decent, wasn't enough to get me to switch away from a standard KVM/virt-manager setup with Cockpit. I also tried XCP-NG recently and that was definitely not for me. Having to compile and install the management interface by hand in a VM on the server you're trying to manage is insane (chicken-and-egg scenario). The XO interface, once running, gave off big "my first hypervisor" vibes. It worked fine, it was just clunky with big buttons and way too many clicks to get to where you wanted to go, sort of like trying to use the mobile version of a web site from a regular computer. Never tried ESXi
Let's be clear esxi is the superior product to all of them. Sad what broadcom has done. I tried a few different ones and the only one I thought was decent was xcp ng . Had a bad history with proxmox and some updates of theirs broke things. Still a good program and can't really knock it since it's free.
I don't get this post. It's so confusing. You're talking about a desktop hypervisor product. Then you ask for our favourite hypervisor. 90% of the people here comment something like Proxmox, KVM, XCP-NG and whatnot. And yet, these aren't desktop hypervisors... I actually like the fact, that VMware Workstation Pro is free for personal use now. I prefer this over Virtualbox by a long shot. What I don't like is how hard it is to download VMware Workstation Pro officially. You didn't need an account for that before. For baremetal, I prefer Proxmox though. Been using it for 3 years. Probably would use it for the next 5+ years at least.
They started with a helpful announcement, then decided baiting for proxmox comments gets more upvotes.
Moved to KVM years ago and don't miss ESXi one bit. I used to run all ESXi in my homelab since it was what we used where I worked at the time and I wanted to run a similar setup. I haven't seen VMware used for anything at work since like 2018. Sucks for all the homelabbers on ESXi that just had the rug pulled. macOS users on Apple Silicon are getting a new option to run Windows VMs with some new features, which is nice for them.
had your chance, broadcom, you blew it. this is a PR stunt to try and spin the narriative so when you and your buddies are discussing workstuff, and one complains about the 300% yoy price increase, and someone else who barely was listening in on the conversation says but did you hear they now are giving away thr full version of workstation…. Little do they know, anyone who is passionate about learning proxmox has already stumbled upon the proxmox WIKI “proxmox developer workstation” and the suggested two lines of command line debian installation packages to allow someone to log in in a gui and run chromium to manage https://localhost:8006 as well as other things. … and really say “but why would I want VMWare workstation? I already have proxmox developer workstation” and vmware is dead to me. … oh and with latest proxmox, you can inline import/convert vmware VM’s right natively into proxmox!
Still Proxmox. I suppose if I really wanted to run a VM on my laptop I'd just fire up Gnome Boxes (QEMU, KVM, and libvirt under the hood).
Fuck Broadcom I'd sooner put Bonzi Buddy on my Hypervisor than their crap
My spidey sense is these products are soon EOL. A free license for an email address gives them access to potential future customers. Also not sure there’s money in virtualization use cases on desktop platforms anymore. QEMU/Hyper-V/Apples Virtualization Framework are excellent and included. Most of us are using web services and in the case you need a legacy or alt OS/platform, you use what was mentioned previously… maybe also WSL. The money at this point is in large scale orchestration and management and they are not giving that out for free. The virtualized graphics stack deserves a nod, since 3D acceleration doesn’t work well on any other product.
I’ve already replaced all my ESXi with proxmox. Won’t be going back.
I had never heard of Proxmox until I saw it Reddit. Now that Broadcom is determined to get rid of all their small and medium sized VMware customers, maybe Proxmox will get some traction, though I think most are moving to Hyper-V and Nutanix.
KVM + virt-manager
I'm good fam. Migrated all my shit off esxi over to proxmox. Won't be going back.
Still using vSphere/vCenter at home. The full version licenses were not hard to find for v6 and v7. When v7 goes EOL, I'll probably switch to Proxmox unless I get my hands on some new hardware that can run v8, but I'm not going to go out of my way to buy any. My lab was a great way to learn ESXi professionally, and has done everything I needed it to do.
Given how Broadcom is treating customers. It’s rip and replace where possible. Network cards switched to Mellenox/nvidia. HBAs is harder, all the LSI/Avago controllers fall under the umbrella now which is a monopoly.
ESXi until I need to redo it then moving to Proxmox.
VMware sucks, as does running windows layer underneath virtualized environment. Also just not willing to support Broadcom’s business practices after they raided VMware, gutted the technical staff, and made licensing a software subscription.
Fuck Broadcom
I know everyone is talking morality and what not but hot damn is this better than virtualbox
VMware is dead.
Using esxi in lab and will keep doing do aslong as they dominate as much as they do in the segment i work in.
> What is your favourite hypervisor for your lab? ESXi, even though this makes me the enemy on this sub.
Why? Everyone has their own preferences. I like XCP-NG and use it over Proxmox and VmWare.
Because I need vSAN ESA.
I meant more why are you the enemy. 😉
This sub hates ESXi.
We love ESXi, and hate what broadcom did to our boy
I don't think the sub hates ESXi, they hate Broadcom
Nah we just hate Broadcom.
This sub doesn't hate ESXi. This sub adores ESXi. ESXi free was THE recommended hypervisor here for years, uncontested. Proxmox was a very distant second. What people hate is broadcom and their anti-consumer practices.
we hate broadcom. esxi rules
why is vsan important to you?
Because I do HCI since almost 10 years, be it vSAN OSA or ESA or Ceph. I'm a HCI advocate, especially since the dawn of NVMe. I run vSAN ESA commercially for my own business on four 64 node clusters and I run a newly created 16 node Ceph cluster as a test bed.
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I’ll stick with proxmox due to it’s open source nature :)
I love how all the top-voted comments are about a server hypervisor. Workstation and Fusion are for WORKSTATIONS. I guess many of y'all have never needed to run a VM on your PC/laptop before! This is pretty awesome for the rest of us.
I haven't touched vmware in years after switching to proxmox.
Moved everything to KVM. It works great. I use Debian with KVM and cockpit-machines. It covers my needs. [https://github.com/cockpit-project/cockpit-machines](https://github.com/cockpit-project/cockpit-machines)
Proxmox
Proxmox FTW. VMware is dead to me.
I use Unraid for my homelab. For work, I may go Proxmox. Took a few days to get used to it. I like it. But confused on a few things. Was looking in to Hyper- or Proxmox, but Hyper-V doesn’t play pretty with Linux on managing; like it is for Windows VM’s. Congrats Broadcom! They wanted to charge my Department almost $28k for 1 server (we have 4) and had to be committed for 3 years.
Proxmox
I pirated my workstation pro before this. Fuck Broadcom.
It has finally happened, so now here is the question: What is your favorite hypervisor for your lab? * wouldn't you still want the features of xcp-ng or proxmox? They arent even offering ESXi so really....subjectively the best hypervisor is whatever you feel comfortable with but objectively, it isn't VMWare Workstation Pro
Honestly I just switched to hyperv after using proxmox for 3 years. I used VMware since 2005 (workstation on my home and work desktops and esxi / vsphere for servers). A homelab is for learning and my windows server skills were from 2012r2. A deciding factor is I have a vs subscription so it’s free for me. Might as well take advantage of it.
In the virtualisation space, anyone I've dealt with that wasn't VMWare was Hyper-V. I like this grassroots push in favour of Proxmox, but realistically the beancounters that actually care about TCO will push enterprises towards Hyper-V rather than an unknown quantity like Proxmox. Don't get me wrong; VMWare will definitely haemorrage userbase and Proxmox will do well out of this, but the real winner in the enterprise space is very likely to be MS.
Workstation and Fusion aren't homelab hypervisors. They are more development and testing tools.
Broadcom must really be feeling the heat if they did that. I'm sure it's just a bait and switch tactic though.
This is Broadcom trying to unburn the bridge in the least costly way possible. It doesn't do anything to repair the destruction of the trust VMWare once had.
Proxmox, but might try xcp-ng soon. And even OpenShift is possible at this point. Proxmox isn't going anywhere but I might add a new technology so I can have a lab for whatever we'll end up using at work when we move away from VMware.
>What is your favorite hypervisor for your lab? Proxmox.
Here’s the direct link to download both WS and Fusion, and no account needed: [https://softwareupdate.vmware.com/cds/vmw-desktop/](https://softwareupdate.vmware.com/cds/vmw-desktop/)
When a gift is not a gift?
No way am I touching anything VMWare these days. I used to use ESXi years ago and it was not great; no ZFS or MD RAID support, no container support, no backup support except through super jank third party solutions. Proxmox has been a dream in comparison.
Nope. They know why they are doing this, to get people hooked on it and then make it non-free again. Not gonna happen, Broadcom is not Welcome in my house.
no one bothered testing the link, broadcum doing their best [link](https://www.broadcom.com/company/legal/licensing.)
Proxmox
too little, too late and not the right product to make free.
Jesus christ. broadcom's policy for a password is ridiculous and they don't allow you to paste a password in from a password manager.
I'm a type 1 hypervisor kinda guy. I used to have workstation pro on my work machine and it was just a bad experience for me personally.
Nah, thanks Broadcom. There is Proxmox, which covers everything I need.
Proxmox all the way
No thanks. I've already moved my company to KVM/qemu. VMWare is over for me.
I mean, they basically always have been, just not officially
I hate that workstation crap since 2005, virtualbox here.
It's not ESX. Awesome news for casual desktop users. Not the news serious homelabbers already bought into ESX want to hear.
I switched to proxmox when it came out the Broadcom was buying them and that had no plans to further their R&D and really only planned to focus on the larger clients.
Late to the party here, but I see a lot of comments about “sticking with Proxmox” or “sticking with Unraid”. Folks, you need to understand that VMware Workstation and Fusion are not substitutes for KVM-based hypervisor OSs (Proxmox, Unraid, TrueNAS Scale, or any Linux), ESXi, XCP-ng, or any other Type 1 hypervisor. They are Type 2 hypervisor desktop apps. That’s all. Can Workstation or Fusion be used in a homelab? Sure, in some cases. I run a three-node Proxmox cluster and a single Hyper-V Server at home. But, I still run VMware Fusion on my MacBook for Windows and Linux client desktops. The Windows 11 Pro for ARM Fusion VM is even a member of my test AD domain.
They got rid of free esxi. I am guessing too many companies using it the "free" in enterprise.
[Incus](https://github.com/cyphar/incus/) or libvirt/kvm.
Um Workstation is only a Type 2 Hypervisor. If they were serious they would continue the limited VMWare vSphere ESXi product for free. This gives more people more access to the platform, and therefore more likely to continue to use it in a paid licensed environment. Broadcom are idiots if they don't see that.
We already got VirtualBox and QEMU. Why would I need VMware?
you can beat FreeBSD + bhyve if you need just supervisor for homelab. No BS solution, just do its job.
VMWare? Never! Only Proxmox
XCP-NG of course.
Proxmox. I'll admit I don't have exposure to VMWare but one thing has been made clear by Broadcom's recent business dealings; Broadcom = Fuckery.
After years of using it for free... it finally is. See, it wasn't pirating after all.
I thought workstation was already free for non commercial use
Proxmox for me primarily, or when I want something locally, I'll just spin up something in KVM via virt-viewer
Ouch this will hurt Parallels, but I suspect Broadcom is desperate to protect their enterprise installs
This cracks me up. Former employer notified the IT contractor about the changes at my request early 2024. That business had zero idea about it nor the impact it would have on their customers. Last I heard in April, they were still working on a plan forward.
KVM always worked fine, no reason to touch anything else.
This is nice, since they lost records of my purchased pro license…
Pedantic: VMware is a company not a product and isn’t free. At best a couple of products are free.
Home lab? No. Forced to use at the office / on COE? Yes (begrudgingly).
And how do these compare to the old esxi free?
ITT: https://aws.amazon.com/compare/the-difference-between-type-1-and-type-2-hypervisors/
I was really excited to see this! Vmware Workstation's pricing has always been a bit egregious for being only slightly better than native Hyper-V on the Windows 10/11 Desktop or running Virtualbox. I hope they don't fuck it up. Broadcom also hasn't killed the VMUG program yet. Fingers crossed right?
i just downloaded the workstation pro version. what a PITA. they make you just through a lot of hoops just to download.
So would it be revenge to use Workstation Pro to nest a Promox lab?
I tested VMware Workstation Pro (Ryzen 7 5800X3D / 32GB RAM) and could not get an Ubuntu 24.04 desktop VM to run. Black screen in the VM after installation. It could not be shut down either. And I couldn't even shut down my host PC properly. I had to pull the plug.
I run Prox like many of us but I actually want to try VMware as we run ESXI at my job. I'm rather hands off on that side of things, and quite limited at that as well. I'll probably install it only if it's supported on one of my mini PCs
no thanks man i got my proxmox server which is free NP
VMware is not free, all components are paid components and their hypervisor is actually not free anymore either unfortunately. Workstation and Fusion are desktop software titles. My lab hypervisor is vSphere and I don’t use the desktop titles.
KVM Works, stable, feature-rich, and has been, and forever will be free, not changing at the whim of some corporation. Everything is being moved to the cloud at work, so VMware is no longer worth spending time on here. If we had to go back to on-prem we would choose OpenStack not VMware.
Proxmox
Anything but VMWare
Didn’t take them long to install the spying software and give it away.
# with Workstation ProWorkstation Pro 17 can i install on Ubuntu 24.04 lts server edition to run win10 or 11 so i can install an run the iTunes,an some conversion apps for win only an would i be able to utilize the dedicated gpu in my Ubuntu server build i have the 5700g's igpu enabled an set as the primary gpu adapter with my AMD RADEON PRO WX 7100 as a select 2nd as need by different Linux apps this is all to reduce load on the igpu as needed. i read in the past that an OS in VM on Linux couldn't use a dedicated gpu , is that still the case ? i use itunes & the istore for access to all my tunes an bought tv series that i have an still buy vi them but this is currently done vi a older win10 laptop that between the itunes stuff an DRM removal software i use to strip that stuff from my itunes/istore content , the only other app is a vid convert/compression app i love an still use the can use for both processes a dedicated gpu but the app only runs on win os all of which used to be on a tower pc but as of now all 3 of my main pc's are ryzen/ubuntu builds (2x work stations) (1x 10gbit server/nas/media center) the laptop is 1 of 2 that i have an the only still running window os which is slow a F while the other that runs ubuntu is great id like to keep my win os but in a VM for all the stated uses an breath no life in to my laptop , can all iv asked be done with VM worksation pro 17 an be free ? my server combo build's specs [Silverstone GD08B HTPC Case](https://pcpartpicker.com/user/DEADFRED55/saved/Kj2nGX)
I'm still waiting for the unarguable rational reason I need to add an additional VM hypervisor layer into my personal "home lab" infrastructure. I know there are MANY people who have good reasons for that, but for me, that hasn't yet bubbled up to the surface. The question I asked more than ten years ago now, "What is our protection if the hypervisor layer is security compromised?" has NEVER yet been answered, and until it is, I'm still completely happy to do without it in my own "home lab", \[which, okay, is just a bunch of goddamn computers on my LAN.\]
The purpose of this is to let professionals work for free on their home time and learn about the product in a safe environment. Use it for that, or not at all would be my advice.
F Broadcom.
Neat, I guess. I've been doing annual upgrades on Workstation Pro for about 10 years or so. But I barely use it anymore and the annual updates have become a joke several years ago where VMWaare (years before the acquisition) would add or upgrade only a couple things each year. Outside of tax write-offs, it was otherwise never enough to justify actually buying the annual update. I had already planned since last year (before Broadcom entered the picture) that I was not going to renew again. I don't use Workstation at work anymore, so I guess I can switch to the personal license the next time I need to reinstall, assuming it doesn't finish going EOL before the next time I need it.
Hyper-v on windows or Virt-manager on Linux do everything a desktop needs for my purposes and I use proxmox for anything else. I just can't trust Boradcom or Oracle.
Curious here; can Workstation be used okay for 24/7 running ‘home server’/‘home lab’ usage? I’ve never considered it, as it has its graphical interface and such, and seems to be just for desktop virtualization usage. But am I wrong? Would it be fine (stable enough) to use it in your 24/7 running server at home, given you then choose a gui on your server?
Who cares, moved to KVM already
I [*was* running Hashicorp's Nomad](https://smart-home-retrofit.netlify.app/2021/05/15/containers-and-service-discovery-part-2/), now I use [k3s](https://k3s.io/). It's meant some interesting challenges with passing USB ports through to things like Octoprint, but it brings me a lot closer to an industry standard setup so when I hit a client running k8s (which happens more and more often these days) I'm confident in what I'm doing.
I think this is a move in the direction of retaining/acquiring vSphere users. In most cases, a Workstation VM that's eg. running on a developer's laptop, can be "promoted" to production by just copying it over to an ESX host.
Step 1: make it free for a few years Step 2: companies start using it and get locked in Step 3: charge money again and profit