Despite brutal price hikes on many products, VMWare makes Fusion Pro and Workstation Pro free for all users

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Commercial subscribers will still receive support through the end of the set term, but support tickets will close entirely afterward.

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Despite severe price hikes to the broader VMWare portfolio, which many companies say are akin to 'being held for ransom,' Broadcom announced today that its two WorkStation Pro and Fusion Pro editions of its VMWare WorkStation Player software would also pivot to a free model. As such, the division between VMWare versions will be solely based on the functionality you want instead of the features you're willing to pay for.

VMWare Fusion Pro and Workstation Pro are no longer available for purchase. Existing commercial contract VMWare users with active support from VMWare have been assured that active support will continue until the end of the contract. However, ticket support through that channel will become impossible afterward.

However, VMWare users needing support won't be out of luck once the premium support disappears. VMWare highlights its existing knowledge base articles, "extensive product documentation," and access to dedicated forums for VMWare Fusion and VMWare Workstation. They also claim that they will still be invested in goals of "new features, usability improvements, and other valuable enhancements" including "maintaining our high standards for stability, with timely updates and reliable performance" while maintaining a focus on "customer-centric growth".

If VMWare is genuinely confident that it doesn't need a premium support tier in the long term, continuing to build upon its existing resources and carefully monitoring its community forums for unfixable bugs and other issues will be integral to its success. Fortunately, the software has been in development for well over 20 years, so most work on it likely boils down to maintenance accounting for new hardware rather than severe bugs or gaps still being ironed out after all this time.

That said, VMWare does have a slightly mixed reputation, with many PC enthusiasts recommending alternative virtualization software. However, the power of VMWare for nested virtualization scenarios is exceptional— late last year, a user of VMWare WorkStation managed to get five Microsoft Operating Systems running simultaneously. This is hardly a standard use case but an impressive demo of VMWare's capabilities now that it's moving into an accessible model for the future.

Hopefully, none of those VMWare Pro commercial contract users are overly reliant on active support for long-term stability in their respective workloads. As long as they're taken care of and left with enough resources to fill the gap once the contract ends, this story seems like a win for most VMWare users, particularly those who want to continue growing the community.

Christopher Harper
Christopher Harper
Contributing Writer

Christopher Harper has been a successful freelance tech writer specializing in PC hardware and gaming since 2015, and ghostwrote for various B2B clients in High School before that. Outside of work, Christopher is best known to friends and rivals as an active competitive player in various eSports (particularly fighting games and arena shooters) and a purveyor of music ranging from Jimi Hendrix to Killer Mike to the Sonic Adventure 2 soundtrack.

5 Comments Comment from the forums
  • bit_user
    I think it's not being done out of generosity, but rather to draw in long time users of Linux' KVM (i.e. Kernel VM) facility, as they have recently transitioned to it.
    https://www.phoronix.com/news/VMware-Workstation-KVM
    That said, I don't know much about either. There are probably a lot more insights shared in the Phoronix comment thread.

    At my job, we've mostly transitioned from VMWare to Proxmox.
    Reply
  • sadsteve
    Eh, I'll stick with QEMU/KVM/libvirt. It was rather easy to get a Windows VM up an running for my games that wouldn't work under Linux (yet!), Affinity Photo and TruboTax.
    Reply
  • SomeoneElse23
    As always, this sucks a bit for those that purchased it, or purchased an upgrade (like me).

    That said, I'm curious to see how Broadcom manages this ongoing. They really bungled the upgrade process after they acquired VMWare, making customers navigate their labyrinth, I mean, website, often to no avail.

    If they keep upgrading it, providing support for ongoing versions of Windows and hardware, and making it easy to obtain without risking running into a minotaur, it's a good thing all around.

    But I suspect they intend to kill it long term, as that's what large corporations do with products they acquired that they don't really want.
    Reply
  • emike09
    We just barely renewed licensing for ESXI 8/vCenter on 5 brand new servers and 4 existing servers. Much to my disappointment. A lot of guys on my team only know VMWare and didn't want to change (and they aren't old fogies).

    I set up full test environments in Hyper-V and Proxmox. We're 95% a Windows Server shop, so I didn't mind going the Hyper-V route that I'm very familiar with, and we almost did, but they didn't even care for Proxmox at all. Datacenter licensing in Hyper-V makes life pretty easy these days and has so many included features we'd use that we couldn't afford with VMWare.

    Ultimately, I'm quite disappointed we stuck with VMWare, especially with how much of a nightmare it's been working with Broadcom. Terrible website, and insanely long wait times for Broadcom to provide any licensing or support. And that price tag was hard to swallow. We would have saved 50k going any route besides VMWare, and that doesn't include Windows Server licensing.
    Reply
  • abufrejoval
    I've bought and used every edition of VMware (Workstation), since the very first they launched in 1999 or so, right after tricking x86 CPUs into running 32-bit VMs via 80486SL derivatives that included the SMM layer, with plenty of traps and a bit of binary translation.

    There only was what "Workstation" is today, it is the original product, a type 2 hypervisor. Their type 1 vSphere offerings came generations later.

    It's helped me tremendously for all sorts of experimentation, but I've never used any VMware product in production, because it was operationally and financially far too inefficient.

    Actually, much of my career was built on offering much better and cheaper VMware (or Nutanix) replacements for production, based on OpenVZ containers. And it was KVM and/or Docker/Podman or even LXC only, when OpenVZ stopped giving.

    Xen was an important catalyst, too, but I see its future rather bleak. If only it didn't come with such a lot of legacy, because the notion of Library OSs really needs a modern implementation.

    VMware Workstation may be free now, but its quality has suffered badly with Broadcom. I've tried the 12.6 release and it just has so many quality issues (which previously version rarely had), that it's time to say goodbye.

    Too bad there is really no alternative on Windows: Hyper-V just never compared in terms of features like nested virtualization, was painful to use and way too instrusive on the Windows OS.

    VirtualBox is at least better than Hyper-V on Windows, but on Linux it's also just become another GUI for KVM (and Linux has better there), because it's simply better than all the proprietary type 2 hypervisors that used to compete in that space.

    I'd really like to have KVM on Windows, too, or rather I guess Windows should just drop its VMS base (sorry David Cutler!) and run as a GUI variant on Linux.

    Just like the VM vendors are shedding their proprietary hypervisors, it's high time for Windows as an OS to go.

    And as soon as my full Steam library no longer looks like fecal matter on Linux, I'm happy to move early and stick with KVM for VMs.

    Still would like OpenVZ containers, though, so much better than LXC and Docker/Podman could be options, shouldn't be exclusive choices.

    Just to be clear: there is no "despite". This is a cost cutting move pure and simple. Broadcom isn't into altruism. "Workstation" may be how VMware got started by Rosenblum and Greene, but it probably stopped being a money-maker long ago, and it certainly doesn't have a future by standard Broadcom profit requirements.

    It also means that support will be minimal to non-existant and it shows in what's left of QA.
    Reply