Broadcom makes VMware Workstation and Fusion free for everyone Broadcom has made its desktop hypervisors freeware – even for production use. Not open source, but free stuff is still good, right? Broadcom's announcement may be bad news for Oracle’s VirtualBox desktop hypervisor, but we doubt that Big Red will lose much sleep over it. For everyone else out there that wants to run VMs on …
VirtualBox got banned company wide here after somebody downloaded the addon to get direct USB support and Oracle's Nasgul descended on corporate IT dept.
Handy when you work on Linux but some HW maker has a firmware update that only runs on Linux
Tell that to Parallels who've moved to yearly, more expensive subscriptions, assuming that everyone on MacOS loves them.
I think Broadcom is doing this to try and reverse some of the adverse PR it's licensing policy has caused and try and get small developers back on board. But, making it free, also allows them to drop support whenever they want.
It took 3–4 days for me to get the Download working since I did something heretical as using Unicode characters (latin though) in my surname.
Their "customer service" isn't the problem, I must say that they did a very impressive job of supporting an end user who has zero cent gain for the company. The problem is the company being a freaking enterprise/mainframe software vendor.
Now imagine you are a developer and found/got bugged with something in the software. If you can, would it take what? Years to reach them?
VirtualBox is another story, IMHO the Linux kernel team/end users/developers does pretty lame things like tainting kernel without any valid reason once you run their dkms/kmod.
If you are running it on Linux, then you may wish to have a look at KVM as well. I recently switched from VirtualBox to KVM on Ubuntu 24.04, and have been very happy with it. I have been using it strictly for software testing, so I can't comment with respect to what it would be like to do daily work on it.
I did find that I couldn't import my existing VirtualBox image into KVM qcow2 format. Theoretically it should be possible, but in practice the converted image didn't run. I was able to import an image meant for VMWare into KVM with no problems however.
I just recently switched to VirtualBox from QEMU/KVM, as after a system update, my Windows 10 guest started randomly hanging 10-30 minutes after starting.
I note that when I removed it, it depended on 93 different packages. Probably more, as those are just the packages that apt said were no longer used by anything. That's quite a web of dependencies and I could not figure out which update caused the problem.
I switched to KVM from VirtualBox mainly because VirtualBox VMs were randomly hanging. The final straw was that after an update VirtualBox wouldn't run at all and it took several weeks for another update to fix that. I haven't had any problems at all with KVM so far. However, I had been using VirtualBox for years and my experience with KVM has been a matter of months so far.
For what I'm using it for (software testing) both offer equivalent functionality. However, the virtual network connections for KVM were much easier to use than was the case for VB.
Never really used VMWare, the biggest ticket feature when compared to VirtualBox is mature 3D virtualization[1] support on both Windows and GNU/Linux guests (AFAIK, VirtualBox only supports 3D Virtualization on Windows guests, QEMU/KVM only supports 3D virtualization on GNU/Linux guests and may not be quite stable yet).
[1]: As in "translate 3D commands from the guest into the single GPU on the host", not "give this entire GPU to the guest OS"
From my experience 3d is emulated and not passthrough for single GPU devices unless your system has more than one GPU then you should be able to passthrough the pcie device to the VM that needs it.
It's a shame that GPUs aren't overcommit capable for compute/memory like CPUs are right now. It might take a few years for that to happen.
So far I haven't seen the ability to share single GPU across multiple VMs yet.
have been using virtualbox for years. had xp running in a window on xp at one time. Found on several occasions i could get something working using virtualbox that wouldn't run on vmware. Also vmware was licensed for a single year and you had to download a new copy at the end of the year. PITA to keep people updated. Wasn't a problem with virtualbox. Finally vmware used to install things by default which then had to be removed to get things working properly. Haven't found it all that much faster either in my use cases.
For linking to https://matduggan.com/the-worst-website-in-the-entire-world/.
For the two minutes I was reading it I felt... validated. Like my agonised screaming into the void had been acknowledged. How did our industry come to this?
Oh, internet. I loved you, once.
WSL2 _is_ a full VM. Just the guest kernel has been stripped down because it mostly only needs drivers for virtual devices. Hyper-V is smart enough to be dynamic about memory sharing between host and guest, which is a huge advantage over VBox. The other being that last I checked VBox couldn't handle avx instructions.
And Broadcom are predatory arseholes. There's no way in heck they would do this out any sort of goodness of their black evil corporate hearts. Maybe it's just so they don't have to bother with it any more, but likely there's some catch to this that will pop up eventually, like suddenly making new installs subscription only again.
I can almost NOT see a company of reasonable size, that is all virtuous that i would be happy to do business with. In almost all cases, you're doing a deal with the devil.
Oracle: Predatory licensing practices, but I do use Virtual Box on my mac.
Apple: Walled garden (good and bad), union-busing behaviour in Apple stores, and certainly anti-competitive, but I own plenty of their devices
Microsoft: Convicted monopolist, tendency to release crappy software, but managing their products is how I get my beer tokens at the end of the week
Broadcom: Blatant disregard for customers through astronomical price rises
Amazon: Complete disregards for workers rights, or mental health but I do love my kindle (I avoid using the Amazon store and side load my books)
Google : I just avoid for their privacy invasive techniques, ditto Facebook. The above list are almost as bad at protecting privacy as well/almost as good at monetising privacy.
And that's just off the top of my head. Not restricted to tech, as well.
Just because I use a product does not mean that I will automatically like the company that produces it.
This post has been deleted by its author
With VMware workstation you can create/import/export VMs that work with vSphere, for troubleshooting, provisioning VM templates, developing OVF/OVA templates etc.
Despite Broadcom most large organisations still run vSphere for their own DCs so Workstation is still quite useful.
For just *running* Linux/Windows VMs on Windows, the built-in Hyper-V works well enough for all my purposes, if WSL2 doesn't fit.
For USB-support in Linux, see https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/connect-usb, works for Hyper-V as well as WSL2.
For USB-support in Windows, use RDP to connect to your VM (it covers most use cases with logged on users).
Also WSL2 is really a better Linux than Linux if you need to work with different distributions :-D
Any Docker container can be exported as a WSL2 image, see:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/use-custom-distro
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
