VMware Workstation is now free

[Mercutio]

Broadcom is at this point well known for trashing every tiny bit of goodwill it had by killing ESXi and perpetual VMware licenses, but it has taken the tiny step of making VMware Workstation and Fusion free for individual use. I assume that means they're never going to update it again and it's a dead product, but right now it's still at least potentially useful.

I haven't touched VMware Workstation since about 2004, but a million years ago I did have a paid copy. KVM and Hyper-V do everything I need nowadays and Virtualbox works if I need to do something on someone else's random system.

 

[ddrueding]

I used it only a couple years ago for someone's personal project that needed virtualization, but with a more user-friendly UI. The main failure at the time was not allowing VMs to auto-start on host computer startup. Most of the calls I got were because the PC had rebooted and the user hadn't gone into Workstation and restarted the VM.

 

[Mercutio]

Weren't you running your whole IT infrastructure off VMware workstation back in the day? Maybe 15 years ago?

 

[ddrueding]

The main offices were always ESXi based, but remote locations frequently only had one PC, and if there needed to be server-ish stuff running it would be using VMWare Workstation on their workstation. The entire PC would be imaged to a USB hard drive daily, and that drive would be swapped out weekly by physically transporting it to HQ so the backup could be integrated. That was back when the best connection we could get to those sites was a T-1. By the end it was Ubiquiti point-to-point backhauls at gigabit speeds with all server functionality brought back to a clean and safe location.