On November 11th, 2024, Broadcom announced that their longtime Type-2 hypervisor VMware Workstation Pro and VMware Fusion (for Mac) are now available for free for commercial, educational, and personal use.
Workstation Pro and Fusion used to require a license to operate or would only operate for a short duration under a trial license. Users could download VMware Workstation Player to use for free as an alternative, which came with a limited feature set compared to Workstation Pro. For instance, with Workstation Player could only manage one virtual machine at a time whereas with Workstation Pro you could manage multiple virtual machines by selecting through the different tabs available. Workstation Player also did not support Snapshots which are a key feature in both testing and production environments. Cloning on virtual machines is another feature that only Workstation Pro has, the Player version is unable to support that feature. Another feature you may have found useful for the Pro version is the ability to connect to ESXi hosts and vCenter servers remotely, yet another full feature that is not available in the Player version.
Well now we can all rejoice as Broadcom has surprisingly made the popular VMware Workstation Pro available to everyone, full features and all. I wonder if this is an attempt to rekindle some customer relationships as the acquisition of VMware back in November of 2023 did not sit well with a lot of IT professionals and customers alike. Broadcom switched VMware's licensing model to a subscription-only based model, snipped many VMware products from being included in the subscriptions, and jacked up the price for a lot of customers.
Now, some VMware products like Horizon (the virtualization desktop infrastructure) platform were picked up by Omnissa who, thus far, has done a pretty good job managing the cost and support of the VDI product. Broadcom's transition process was not very smooth either, their support, patches, and updates left a lot to be desired. among the VMware faithful.
The strategy to offer free products to the public may be to entice new customers who are looking for virtualization hypervisors in hopes of securing their business. Other virtualization companies have pitched their own solutions as alternatives to VMware's in attempts persuade customers to switch, some companies like Nutanix even offer their hypervisor for free. Microsoft has always offered their Hyper-V hypervisor for free in either the Type-1 (bare-metal) mode or Type-2 (software) mode assuming you have the Windows Server licensing on your Type-2 server.
It isn't like VMware to offer free products anymore, so this is a nice offer that users should certainly consider. The only drawback is that there is no longer support for Workstation Pro or Fusion, that is unless you currently have a contract with them. Hopefully VMware continues to offer their products for free use, this would be enticing for the company as they could offer more feature rich options to customers by having them subscribe to their tiered licensing if they enjoy their free products.
Download VMware Workstation Pro and VMware Fusion for free HERE.