It's competitor, VirtualBox has the honour of being the only piece of software that 'taints' the Linux kernel, not because it's proprietary (VirtualBox is OSS) but because it's that poor quality that the Linux kernel maintainers don't want to support it.
I'm sick at the thought of having to deal with Yet Another VM Format.
https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/releasenotes/MacOSX/...
https://github.com/mist64/xhyve
CoreOS on xhyve:
Never mind - I'll buy Fusion.
My sincere hope, if Fusion is going to go away, is that Parallels will have an influx of customers and not be forced into doing silly advertising/bundling things to maintain their revenue.
I have always preferred Parallels and every time I evaluate the two, Parallels integrates better and performs better.
1. VirtualBox shared folders performance is terrible.
2. VMWare Fusion is the only shared folders implementation I've found (tried Parallels, VirtualBox, and VMWare Fusion) that can follow symbolic links, making them look like normal files/directories on the guest (useful for Windows guests which don't understand nix symlinks).
3. IIS can't host applications off of VirtualBox shared folders for some permissions reason, which cannot be fixed.
I really hope VMWare Fusion doesn't die, as it's the only product I've found that supports my use case.
Maybe Google or Apple or Facebook or other software company can hire the team before all of them get jobs in very different companies.
Not for the team itself, those great developers will find jobs without issue.
But for the company hiring them, a well oiled team is worth a lot more than the sum of each of the individual developers on their own.
On the cloud front, no one uses their expensive product. You'd use KVM, Xen, Proxmox, etc that you had the source for and could modify. If you're running linux you might as well run a linux hypervisor.
I suspect these layoffs were rational moves for a changing industry. We're testing Hyper-V at work to get away from VMware licensing, which is fairly stiff, for the few thing that aren't on the cloud/VPS. The industry is changing again and the room for big VMware shops is smaller than it was just a few years ago. There's way too much economic sense to move to cloud providers instead of hosting your own.
Or I may be wrong and established companies should play by different rules than startups regarding their more productive teams, because it's more cost effective.
Not to mention, slowing revenues on the server front means they can't subsidize the cheaper or even free client solutions anymore.
This seems a strategic exit by VMWare to cede all desktop-hosted virtualization markets to competitors. Probably because that category didn't meet an arbitrary profitability criteria, instead of a customer-focused analysis of what value propositions the product line brought to the table when looked at as a part of an entire picture of all other products offered.
Another possibility is VMWare might be defocusing their traditional virtualization and this is the first of an all-in shift to containers because that's a growth market at the moment.
Not a few enterprise customers value these "low profitability" product lines, because they promise to lower the complexity of dealing with a wide-area problem space. After IBM ditched their "low-profit" servers, for example, you can find a CIO going on record here and there saying they abandoned their all-IBM-servers policy in their shops. I can assure you there are many more who did not go on record.
Applying a single financial metric across all your products loses focus upon what really matters to your customers. It looks great to boost relative margins, though. By jettisoning certain product lines that complemented and completed a market message to your customers, you open up high-margin products to much more effective competitive attacks. It will be interesting to see what VMWare's competitors come up with.
Supporting container workloads doesn't need to come at the expense of "traditional" virtualization, e.g. see the work being done with vSphere Integrated Containers[1] or AppCatalyst[2], particularly since most (all?) containers ran on cloud providers are running in a VM.
N.B. I work at VMware, but as an engineer in a completely unrelated BU I have absolutely no insight into Workstation/Fusion strategy
[1] http://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2015/10/vsphere-integrated-c...
Absolutely agree with you, I think machine and container virtualization should co-exist in a sophisticated ecosystem and it isn't an either-or. Just as server- and desktop-hosted virtualization should co-exist on another axis of the ecosystem.
I lack insight into why VMWare effectively gave up on holding down the desktop end of the spectrum, which essentially tells customers that the capability to scale from desktops to servers is no longer as important to its mission or business model. Perhaps native desktop OS support for virtualization is shaping up much faster and more robustly than we realize, VMWare execs see the writing on the wall and decided to exit the space on a high note instead of fighting future ever-declining revenues in that space, and they will count upon lower-margin solutions based upon native desktop OS virtualization features to address the desktop-to-server scaling issue.
Having to use VirtualBox over here (which I've had problems with before) and KVM over there and Hyper-V over there and whatever shows up on OS X yet again would be such a pain in the ass.
It's more boring than that. They've decided to offshore the jobs. The management probably believes these products are at market saturation anyway, so beyond attrition to container-oriented solutions like Docker, it's not likely Fusion or Workstation will actually go away or feel that different.
What's disappointing is that this team could have been everything Docker or Vagrant is - repeatable environments and workflow for developers.
That's unfortunate. I was looking forward to something like a VMWare Fusion/Workstation-powered session that starts off with a virtualized OS, auto-generates a container configuration file by watching everything you install and detecting what the installed app uses while you run it through its paces, creates and deploys a containerized app, perhaps onto your laptop and perhaps injecting directly into a cloud instance you point to (bonus points for integrated account support and API hooks for customizing the cloud deployment flow or injecting into your Chef/Puppet/etc. infrastructure)...then does it in reverse as well. Or "sync" a container to a virtualized OS version of the app, where you can deploy the full panoply of debugging tools to inspect what is happening on the container in ways that would be terribly inconvenient or not even possible on the container, like using log file analysis tools that wouldn't be on the container. It would take a performance hit, but for some the trade-off might be worth it. Or create an "instrumented" container, that intercepts failed operations like a library missing from the container, which then starts a sync with a virtualized OS version presumably with the missing library that completes the call. The possibilities I saw were endless.
The article asks the obvious question of whether the products will continue to be available in maintenance mode, or whether they will be discontinued?
Wow!
There are currently no official statements on what will happen with the products, but I would expect them to try and continue the product. Then again.. who knows.
[1] - http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/support/Product-Lifecycle-Ma...
And what exactly is support? Major improvements? Bug fixes? Security?
Just recently I bought a new MacBook Pro and was debating between Fusion and Parallels. I recalled all the annoying ads in Parallels that really frustrated me (since it was a paid-for product, nothing something free and ad-supported) and so I purchased a new license for Fusion 8 Pro.
I suppose I'll consider myself lucky if it's still getting updates a year from now.
I've also been debating another decision recently -- whether to stick with VMware ESXi for our infrastructure or to move things over to KVM. I think that decision has now been made.
Yeah, no thanks.
External USB devices behave very differently between both products.
As I understand it they're just off-shoring development to China. VMware already has a development team in Beijing, so they're consolidating development there instead. Never mind that it's just as expensive to build a product there, and that the brain trust with all the institutional knowledge is in Palo Alto.
If the same thing happens for VMWare Workstation, I fear we're entering a dark age for desktop virtualization...
VirtualBox on the other hand is stuck in prehistoric OpenGL 2.1 (no programmable shaders), and most features are pure software emulation.
This may seem silly, OpenGL in a virtual machine, but I do some light OpenGL based graphics in my spare time, and it's pretty convenient to test if code works on a different platform without rebooting. I also have a Windows only machine where I use VMWare to develop on Linux (because developing on Windows is really uncomfortable when you're used to command line tools and the Linux eco system).
I hope these products find a new home. If they were truly made by such a small team, perhaps a smaller company could buy the rights and code and continue their development?
I remember (back in early-mid 2000 I think, my memory is a bit hazy) installing VMWare on a couple of company training lab machines.
One machine ran Windows, the other Redhat Linux. I installed VMWare on both. On the RedHat machine I brought up a VM running Windows (2000 I think), on the Windows machine I brought up a VM running RedHat.
Suffice to say my jaw dropped with amazement (yes, I know, but simple things at all that). I then got on the phone yelling for my colleagues to get over to the lab pronto because I had something amazing to to show them, and jibbering on about "Windows is running inside Linux!!".
So thank you VMWare Workstation folks for brightening up an otherwise dull day :)
Back then, I used it for running multiple versions of Windows so I could test web apps on different versions of IE (4 and 5, I think), when IE was still the dominant browser.
It was such a game changer at the time.
There was a time when a specific version of vmware workstation (version 3.x from ... 2001 ? 2002 ?) had a nice, detailed recipe to get it running, under linux binary compat, on FreeBSD.
So you could run the Linux version of vmware workstation on FreeBSD.
The problem was, this recipe and set of hacks needed to make this work only worked with vmware 3, and after 2003 or 2004, vmware wouldn't even sell it to you - you couldn't even download it.
But I kept a copy and continued to very happily use vmware3 until 2009, on successively newer FreeBSD hosts. No, it didn't have graphics card support and I couldn't plug in my USB flash drives, etc., but the basic value proposition was still there - run any guest OS I felt like.
My point is: don't trash your old install packages for (whatever version of vmware workstation you like) and keep your serial numbers - this is a piece of software that can continue providing very high value LONG after vmware abandons it.
I assume these layoffs are related to the acquisition of EMC? http://techcrunch.com/2016/01/26/vmware-confirms-layoffs-in-...
I've been using linux (centos) since '06. I've tried nearly all of the virtualisation products out there and always stuck with VMWare. On the desktop I've bounced from Windows, to Linux (ubuntu) to now a mac.
VM Fusion pretty much gets installed as my first app which allows me to run a linux env for development. Shared Folders is mandatory for me. Snapshots is a good send and never ever ever crashing no matter what I do with it via Windows 7 in it's own VM.
I'm so in bed with Vmware Fusion right now, I cannot think that another product will replace it. I know there are other products, but these don't simply cut it at all.
I will be praying to the apple or virtualisation "gods" out there and hoping someone buys the team and either spins off a new product or carries on.
I guess after 2017, I will hope the product keeps on working and keeps running with the latest mac releases.
Hopefully someone can make a petition to Apple to buy this team also. I'd sign it. They have the money after all and it would be a great addition to the OS.
I have fond memories of VMWare Express, the first VMWare that I bought. It was a restricted version of VMWare workstation that could only run Windows 9x (Win4Lin was also nice), but all that I could afford on a student budget. At some point I even got it working on NetBSD with its Linux compatibility layer and (IIRC) some NetBSD kernel modules that someone implemented for VMWare Workstation 2.x. There's still a screenshot on the NetBSD website sporting my NetBSD desktop with VMWare Express in 2002:
Register article: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/01/27/vmware_fusion_and_wo...
With this change we're going to be looking at Hyper-V a lot sooner than I expected, but I guess this was bound to happen regardless. More and more of the devs I work with are using Vagrant or Docker and LXC rather than Workstation or Fusion. Hosted UI sales must've been trending down.
For many years, I've been running many Linux VMs and a few Windows VMs using Fusion on various Mac hardware and OSes. It's been super-helpful to my workflow (mostly teaching-related), at very low cost, measured in either dollars or hours.
Thanks to all who helped to make that happen, and best wishes to developers and users as the future unfolds.
Thank you chipx86 and everyone else who brought this sorcery into my life.
If this isn't a sign of the decline of enterprise desktop software, nothing is!
