
A Tribute to VMware Workstation, Fusion, and Hosted UI - jwise0
http://blog.chipx86.com/2016/01/26/a-tribute-to-vmware-workstation-fusion-and-hosted-ui/
======
Shorel
VMWare just shot itself in the head.

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.

~~~
drzaiusapelord
VMWare is running scared of Hyper-V, which is good enough now for most use
cases and comes free with a Windows server license. For Windows shops, SMB's,
etc this is a no-brainer.

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.

~~~
agopaul
Yeah but the team was in charge of consumer solutions (Workstation and
Fusion), not datacenter solutions (vSphere, etc)

~~~
drzaiusapelord
Since Windows 8, Windows now ships with client Hyper-V. I imagine this is
affecting sales as well.

Not to mention, slowing revenues on the server front means they can't
subsidize the cheaper or even free client solutions anymore.

~~~
toyg
Workstation and Fusion have never been free, and not even "cheap".

The problem is that really-free alternatives are now good enough for most
uses: VirtualBox is the go-to choice for Linux and OSX and is fairly solid,
while Hyper-V now ships with Windows and is overall quite good.

VmWare have also run out of mainstream features to add, so it got harder and
harder to solicit paid upgrades for what is basically an old-school
shrinkwrap.

What they will likely do is freeze the codebase and turn it in a mini-SaaS
where you don't get Tools updates and new OS support unless you pay a yearly
sub. In practice that's already the case, they will just make it more locked
down. You don't need talent for that sort of thing.

------
nailer
This is a real pity: VMWare Fusion is AFAIK the only stable desktop
virtualisation app for OS X.

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.

~~~
danieldk
This is really a shame. I am really hoping Veertu[1] will be a thing, because
the idea seems to be really nice: providing a good UI for OS X's hypervisor
framework.

[1] [http://veertu.com/](http://veertu.com/)

~~~
Cyberdog
I installed Veertu it and gave it a try. I'm mostly interested in hosting
FreeBSD clients, so I was happy to see a FreeBSD net install disk image in its
list of options, but the client kernel panics as it boots. Fusion supports
FreeBSD (and any other OS I've thrown at it in recent memory) flawlessly…
Guess I'll stick with it for now.

~~~
toyg
Does it have it's own format for images, or does it support VMX / VMDK ?

I'm sick at the thought of having to deal with Yet Another VM Format.

~~~
Cyberdog
I had a FreeBSD VMDK, but I couldn't figure out how to get Veertu to open it,
so if Veertu does support it, it's not obvious how.

------
sspiff
This is a shame. I had recently migrated to VMWare Workstation (from
VirtualBox) because they have far superior OpenGL support (OpenGL 3.3, and 4.x
is coming in near-future Linux kernel releases).

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?

~~~
mmozeiko
OpenGL 2.1 has programmable shaders. GLSL shaders were moved to core in OpenGL
2.0 version. See here:
[https://www.opengl.org/wiki/History_of_OpenGL#OpenGL_2.0_.28...](https://www.opengl.org/wiki/History_of_OpenGL#OpenGL_2.0_.282004.29)

------
yourapostasy
Great description of what a tight-knit, motivated team can accomplish.

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.

~~~
frostmatthew
> 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.

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...](http://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2015/10/vsphere-integrated-
containers-technology-walkthrough.html)

[2] [http://getappcatalyst.com/](http://getappcatalyst.com/)

~~~
walterbell
Is is likely that Hyper-V in Windows 10 or the OS X hypervisor framework will
evolve into replacements for Workstation/Fusion?

~~~
mhurron
That would suck. VMWare Fusion/Workstation/Player mean I can run the exact
same VM on a Mac, Windows and Linux without any modification.

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.

------
jlgaddis
I've used both VMware Workstation and Fusion (paying for both out of my own
pocket) on and off for years, as I've went back and forth between OS X and
Linux on my primary workstation.

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.

~~~
jbverschoor
try veertu.com

~~~
jlgaddis
Let's see... I can't run FreeBSD or OpenBSD and I can't create any VMs myself?
I can only run -- untrusted, by the way -- VMs that I download from some web
site?

Yeah, no thanks.

------
dekhn
VMWare Workstation was one of the greatest products of all time (in the early
2000s). It made it possible for me to get a lot more work done on a single
computer. At some point, VMWare the company shifted to enterprise VMs,
absurdly overpriced, and VirtualBox could do everything VMWare could. But for
several years in the early 2000s, Workstation was a truly great product.

~~~
Shorel
VirtualBox still can't do everything VMWare can.

External USB devices behave very differently between both products.

~~~
TallGuyShort
It's certainly no longer clear that VMware is hands-down superior to
VirtualBox for desktop virtualization. I maintain a library of VM images and
most of my users have been going with VirtualBox in the last couple of years
because it's so much easier to get your hands on and it has worked out-of-the-
box more reliably on a variety of systems in the last few years, and also the
ability to have network port forwarding configured by an appliance rather than
solely on the host. VMware seems to be the platform of choice in large
enterprises where you can easily get a license or already have the
infrastructure in place. For more casual desktop users, I really don't see it
in use anymore.

------
Patrick_Devine
This is a great tribute to a wonderful team. Even after all these years I'm
still using Fusion despite having left VMware three years ago after over a
decade long stint.

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.

~~~
walterbell
Is the off-shoring for all products or just Workstation?

~~~
Patrick_Devine
Just the hosted (Workstation/Fusion) team as I understand it, although I've
heard there are also big cuts to vCloud Air.

------
teh_klev
VMWare was my first real life encounter with virtualisation

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
:)

~~~
slantyyz
My memories go back to 2000 as well, running it on a Pentium III laptop.

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.

------
zymhan
I do like Fusion, it beats VirtualBox, which I've used for years. I've been
considering switching to Linux and using KVM to host my VMs instead. Virt-
manager is an amazing frontend, and being able to modify my VM by editing a
few command line switches is the bee's knees

I assume these layoffs are related to the acquisition of EMC?
[http://techcrunch.com/2016/01/26/vmware-confirms-layoffs-
in-...](http://techcrunch.com/2016/01/26/vmware-confirms-layoffs-in-earnings-
statement-as-it-prepares-for-dell-acquisition/)

------
ethbro
I know it's not the new hotness (Wikipedia has Workstation released in 1999),
but as a product I was always pretty impressed with it. It felt like a mutant
from a time when developers said "No, we're going to fix bugs and spend time
on our core functionality" instead of adding another feature. To hear it was
done with a team of around 20 during its lifetime? Impressive! It's
unfortunate for the team, but hopefully they'll find new positions quickly.

------
sspiff
VirtualBox has been on life support for the past few years, not seeing any
major development since Sun got acquired by Oracle.

If the same thing happens for VMWare Workstation, I fear we're entering a dark
age for desktop virtualization...

~~~
toyg
VirtualBox is actually fairly strategic inside big-O. They had to sort out its
positioning vis-a-vis Oracle VM and "the cloud", as well as dealing with the
usual wave of developers leaving (Oracle and Sun are _very_ different
cultures...) but I think they've since rebooted its development in earnest.

------
no1youknowz
OMG. My heart is literally in my mouth right now.

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.

------
danieldk
This is _really_ a shame. I have bought many VMWare versions over the years
(both Workstation and Fusion). I have always liked the product for it's
performance and nice interface.

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:

[https://www.netbsd.org/gallery/in-Action/dekok-
vmware.png](https://www.netbsd.org/gallery/in-Action/dekok-vmware.png)

------
walterbell
HN comment by chipx86 on Workstation dev history:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10978913](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10978913)

Register article:
[http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/01/27/vmware_fusion_and_wo...](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/01/27/vmware_fusion_and_workstation_development_team_fired/)

------
rsync
Just some perspective ...

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.

~~~
wl
The way Apple keeps on changing OS X, I worry about how viable Fusion is in
the long run if VMware stops updating it or their QA slips as they update it.

------
PhantomGremlin
The tl;dr is that the engineers responsible for VMware Workstation and VMware
Fusion were just laid off.

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!

~~~
wila
VMware has to follow their own rules, they have an official End Of Life
support strategy and that means they have to at least support VMware Fusion
until 2017/02/25 [1]

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...](http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/support/Product-Lifecycle-Matrix.pdf)

~~~
FireBeyond
"VMware has to follow their own rules" ... or what, exactly? I don't think you
can buy a support contract for Fusion.

And what exactly is support? Major improvements? Bug fixes? Security?

------
leonroy
One of the few products I find irreplaceable is Fusion. The fact that we could
test and build on our desktops in Fusion or Workstation and deploy straight to
VSphere kept us hooked on VMware's products.

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.

------
mhw
VMWare Workstation was a great product - I used it right from the very
earliest betas on Linux. But somewhere along the line they seemed to stop
taking an interest in individual purchasers like me. I stopped getting the
reminders to purchase an upgrade license, and then before I noticed I'd fallen
off the upgrade treadmill and catching up to a current version was just too
expensive to justify.

------
northernprof
This news is dismaying.

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.

------
maguirre
This is a shame. I go back and forth between Virtual Box and Workstation.
However Virtual Box's external USB device support works only 50% of the time
for me. Does anyone here have suggestions for someone running Windows and
Virtualizing Windows and Linux ?

------
tbyehl
With the ubiquity of virtualization today it's easy to forget how magical this
was in 1999. "I'm running another computer within my computer! At (close
enough to) FULL SPEED!"

Thank you chipx86 and everyone else who brought this sorcery into my life.

------
pixelmonkey
Wow. I still use VMWare Workstation all the time. I guess it's time to switch
to VirtualBox and Windows 10 for my occasional MS Office needs.

If this isn't a sign of the decline of enterprise desktop software, nothing
is!

------
ThinkBeat
Dell / EMC / Vmware Borlanding all over again.

