VMware Workstation Shifting from Proprietary Code to Using Upstream KVM (opens in new tab)

>I'm not sure I ever envisioned VMware abandoning their proprietary virtualization code in favor of leveraging upstream KVM but in any event it's a terrific success story for the upstream KVM community.

I can pretty much guarantee this move was because they want to can all of the people maintaining the proprietary virtualization code. The odds of Broadcom making any significant upstream contributions, beyond the small bit of code they need for workstation to function, is almost 0. I guess you can call it a "win" in that there's one less competing product in the market, but I don't see it boosting KVM functionality or quality in any meaningful way.

VMware Workstation wasn't part of the end-user computing division spinoff to KKR?

https://www.sdxcentral.com/articles/news/broadcom-unloads-vm...

> Boadcom is selling VMware’s End-User Computing (EUC) Division to KKR for $4 billion... This includes its Horizon desktop and application virtualization platform, and Workspace One unified endpoint management platform.

AIUI they already had to do something similar on Windows. Enabling certain features causes Windows to boot itself inside Hyper-V, and VMwares own hypervisor can't run nested under the Hyper-V hypervisor, so VMware gives up and runs its guests directly on Hyper-V instead.

VMware Workstation/Fusion team has always been underfunded and understaffed. Every year, they release a reskinned version with a few minor features to justify the cost to buyers. They really don't have the cycles to maintain a competitive product that would include major changes or large feature advancements. (Fusion is basically a dead product because it can't do performant x86_64 emu/v12n on arm Macs. The closest replacement is UTM, based on QEMU, but it's really slow.)

The problem this introduces is it probably won't work with existing customer tooling built for W/F, won't work with open-vm-tools, and will be incompatible with existing VMs. IOW, this will likely have a net negative impact on users.

Sad.

Having used Workstation, the graphic performance inside its GUI is really nice, it's better than anything else on the market by a far margin. It performs better than virt-manager/qemu on Linux.

Could this move require VMWare/BC to release source code that could improve qemu/virt-manager? KVM is GPL if not mistaken.

I wonder how this will work on Windows Workstation hosts?

off topic, but has anyone succesfully registered their Workstation Pro single user license with broadcom? I followed the instructions they send to my email like a month ago, but it still says on the broadcom portal that i am not eligible to download latest version despite me having a valid license.

context: Broadcom has made Pro free for private users but you still need to register with them to download it.

Wouldn't that violate GPL?

I think this is great, at least on a personal level.

I've been running esxi to host my home infrastructure for many years. But Broadcom took that away.

As such, I've been looking around for a replacement, and if KVM can now support VMWare VMs natively, that will make my migration process a lot simpler.

Or am I missing something important?

I wonder if they’ll stop trying to fleece their remaining customers as much.

Seems like everyone is switching from vmware to kvm - including vmware.