VMware Workstation Pro is going FREE for Personal Use
The time is now! With the acquisition of VMware by Broadcom, the world of virtualization technology has been rocked by large changes to the enterprise virtualization giant. If you want to find enterprise level alternatives to Oracle VirtualBox, then your moment has come.
A New Plan
With the changes that Broadcom wants to bring to the table for both Fusion and Workstation, both these hypervisors will be receiving a new product scheme that will surely entice new users to use their products! There will be 2 pricing models for both Fusion and Workstation: Free for Personal Use and Paid Commercial Use. This will now allow users who want to use VMWare for their hypervisor to freely use it for personal projects without having to pay for a subscription or product key.
What this Means for Developers?
With these changes, Windows, Mac and Linux users can all use their respective versions of VMWare with Pro privileges for free! No payment needed, just register according to the needs posted on VMware’s website and you are good to go!
Is VMware the best virtualization software market now? Highly debatable, since there are many options out on the market that are also easily accessible for free: VirtualBox, KVM, Qemu, and Proxmox, just to name a few examples. However, many users have openly expressed that VMware does have a better experience compared to tools like VirtualBox, so that alone might already be a good sign for things to come. As for the home lab community, it is very common to see people running their own Proxmox machines, and there is a low chance that users would switch from that to VMware just for the suite of tools. If you can run Proxmox, you are more than qualified to not have to use VMware as your preferred hypervisor.
That all being said, VMware is taking steps to regain the trust they lost after sunsetting many projects on their platform after the acquisition by Broadcom, and hopefully with this change, many users will find a good spot for VMware in their toolkit once again.
