Broadcom makes VMware Fusion and Workstation free for all users

VMware Workstation and VMware Fusion are now free for all users. Didn't Broadcom make them free already in March 2024?

Yes, the products had been transitioned to a free for personal use model. But, the original announcement stated that the commercial version of the products would remain as a paid product. Six months later, there are no such restrictions, you can use VMware Fusion and Workstation for free even in commercial and educational environments.

Is the development of VMware Workstation and VMware Fusion being halted?

Broadcom has also confirmed that Workstation Pro and Fusion Pro are no longer available for purchase. The company will continue to honor existing contracts, and provide service and support until the end of the term. The big question is, are the products discontinued?

According to a comment by a VMware employee, it appears that the engineering team is not affected by the changes (only the sales of the products are). So the development of the products will continue. That does seem like a nice surprise. Broadcom does have plenty of other VMware products which brings in money.

However, one point to note is that VMware/Broadcom's support team will not offer support directly to users. Instead, you will need to discuss it on community forums, and use online guides and documentation to troubleshoot issues. This may not seem like a problem for personal users, but it could be a nightmare for sysadmins who manage business endpoints and networks.

Download VMware Workstation and VMware Fusion for commercial, educational or personal use

You can read about the features of VMware Workstation and VMware Fusion at the Desktop Hypervisor page. Refer to my previous article to download VMware Workstation Pro for Windows and Linux, and VMware Fusion Pro for Mac. Nothing has changed there, you will still need to head over to Broadcom's support portal, and login to your account. https://support.broadcom.com/group/ecx/downloads.

The latest version of VMware Workstation Pro for Windows and Linux is 17.6.1, and VMware Fusion Pro is 13.6.1. You can also choose to download older versions of the software if required.

It is rather odd that the download page lists VMware Workstation Pro and VMware Workstation Pro for personal use separately. There are no differences between the two versions, the file sizes, and the checksums are the same, and even the license agreement appears to be identical.

Business users are unhappy with VMware

There are numerous complaints from business users and admins about the recent VMWare price hikes, of which there have been multiple. One comment says that their renewal price went from 7K in 2022 (assuming it is in US dollars), to 150K in 2024. That is quite an insane jump. This was pretty much expected after the acquisition by Broadcom.

Tom's Hardware quotes an article from Business Insider, which mentions that companies are comparing the price hikes akin to being held by ransom. Some people are also upset that Broadcom has removed features like legacy VMTools ISOs (can still be downloaded), Bluetooth hub pass through, Physical host parallel ports support, Unity mode, and Enhanced Keyboard driver.  Some admins say they have migrated to Proxmox Virtual Environment, since it is an open source, based on Debian GNU/Linux, and is also supported by Veeam.

VMWare is still pretty good for most home users. I run a Linux Mint VM in Workstation, and also use it for testing Windows 11 builds from the preview channels. They work perfectly fine, at least for my use cases. If you want to move away from VMware, VirtualBox is still the most popular alternative.