Broadcom makes VMware Workstation and Fusion free for everyone

And yes, that does include commercial use in production

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 their desktop or laptop, it's good news.

VMware Workstation 17.6.1, on Linux, running a different Linux. For nothing – click to enlarge

The giveaway follows Broadcom's decision back in May to make the apps free for personal, non-commercial use. Back then, the news caused quite a few people to head for the Broadcom Support Portal, the only source of legal downloads, leading blogger Matt Duggan to dub it The Worst Website In The Entire World.

He had a point. The long-suffering Reg FOSS desk already had a free personal VMware account, and we couldn't find the download anywhere.

There are two different versions of desktop VMware: VMware Workstation runs on Windows and Linux, and VMware Fusion for macOS (both Intel and Apple Silicon). As these full-function versions are now freeware, Virtzilla is discontinuing its existing free offering, VMware Player, on all three host OSes.

If you are a hardcore FOSS enthusiast, you may well meet the news with indifference. Linux and the BSD families have their own perfectly good all-FOSS hypervisors, and they are capable tools. Similarly, Windows users – at least, those with the Pro edition or better – get Hyper-V thrown in for free.

Apple's macOS has a built-in hypervisor, too, but it lacks a friendly UI. There are alternatives: we looked at UTM last year, as one example. UTM lacks handy tools such as VM snapshots, though.

Arm hypervisor upgraded, nested

VMware has for years offered an unsupported version of its flagship ESXi hypervisor for the Arm architecture, and recently upgraded it to Version 2.0.

The version jump came with a change from version 7.x to version 8.x ESXi codebase, the current edition of the hypervisor. The update gains features including undocumented nested virtualization capabilities.

Broadcom's plans for ESXi-on-Arm remain obscure: it has told The Register it doesn't plan to port the vStack to Arm.

– Simon Sharwood

We reckon the most direct rival is Oracle's VirtualBox, which we last looked at when version 7.0 came out in 2022. The latest version is version 7.1, released in September.

There is a widely-held misunderstanding that VirtualBox is not really FOSS, or that its Guest Additions aren't, or that it's crippled without them. None of these beliefs are true – the program is entirely GPL3 Free Software and it's in the repositories of many Linux distros, as are its Guest Additions. For instance, in an Ubuntu VM, you can just type sudo apt install -y virtualbox-guest-x11 and it will install the guest additions direct from Ubuntu's repositories. You don't need the Guest Additions, but they provide some handy extra features – such as bi-directional copy-and-paste between guest and host, and 3D accelerated graphics drivers.

The part of VirtualBox that is not free is the VirtualBox Extension Pack, which has its own license. It's free for non-commercial use, but production use of the Extension Pack needs a paid per-seat license – or a $50-per-seat enterprise version. The Extension Pack provides some extra bells and whistles – such as encrypted virtual disks, connection to VMs over RDP, PXE boot, PCI passthrough, and so on. If you don't need those things, you can use VirtualBox fine without the Extension Pack. VirtualBox 7 includes built-in support for USB 2 and 3 in VMs, which did need the Extension Pack in older versions.

So we regard VirtualBox as the principal cross-platform rival to VMware Workstation: the features are broadly comparable, and the base program really is FOSS, while VMware is freeware. Saying that, in some of this vulture's previous roles, colleagues were dismissive of VirtualBox as an inferior tool. It's not FOSS, but VMware is somewhat more capable – although in our testing on Ubuntu 24.10, VMWare Workstation told us that 3D acceleration and sound were not available.

In recent years, full hardware-assisted virtualization is becoming common, generic functionality that most processor architectures include in some form. This makes hypervisors much easier to create and run – essentially they are providing an easy UI around something the hardware does anyway. The value lies in additional features, especially for corporate server hypervisors, such as live migration of VMs from one host to another.

Desktop tools are, we suspect, not very lucrative any more. So making its VMware desktop tools free of charge is an interesting move for Broadcom: it could be hoping for some "halo effect" to help keep customers in its marketplace of tools and formats.

Longer term, it could be that desktop VMware will become a lighter-weight tool that relies upon facilities provided by the underlying OS. A recent patch to the Linux kernel allows VMware to run VMs using the kernel's KVM feature:

To be able to switch VMware products running on Linux to KVM some minor changes are required to let KVM run/resume unmodified VMware guests.

In case you have any difficulty finding the downloads yourself, we suggest the links in Broadcom's free personal use announcement from May. This contains direct download links to Fusion (for macOS) and Workstation (for Windows and Linux), and at time of writing they point to the latest free versions. ®