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A Tribute to VMware Workstation, Fusion, and Hosted UI

by jwise0 on 1/27/16, 6:57 AM with 76 comments

  • by Shorel on 1/27/16, 4:04 PM

    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.

  • by nailer on 1/27/16, 1:17 PM

    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.

  • by sspiff on 1/27/16, 2:37 PM

    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?

  • by yourapostasy on 1/27/16, 1:31 PM

    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.

  • by jlgaddis on 1/27/16, 4:12 PM

    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.

  • by dekhn on 1/27/16, 3:04 PM

    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.

  • by Patrick_Devine on 1/27/16, 6:06 PM

    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.

  • by teh_klev on 1/27/16, 2:29 PM

    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 :)

  • by zymhan on 1/27/16, 1:14 PM

    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-...

  • by ethbro on 1/27/16, 1:14 PM

    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.

  • by sspiff on 1/27/16, 2:44 PM

    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...

  • by no1youknowz on 1/27/16, 9:51 PM

    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.

  • by danieldk on 1/27/16, 2:39 PM

    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

  • by walterbell on 1/27/16, 6:14 PM

  • by rsync on 1/27/16, 6:44 PM

    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.

  • by PhantomGremlin on 1/27/16, 10:55 AM

    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!

  • by leonroy on 1/27/16, 9:35 PM

    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.

  • by mhw on 1/27/16, 2:07 PM

    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.

  • by northernprof on 1/28/16, 5:47 AM

    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.

  • by maguirre on 1/27/16, 4:36 PM

    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 ?

  • by tbyehl on 1/27/16, 7:44 PM

    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.

  • by pixelmonkey on 1/27/16, 9:29 PM

    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!

  • by ThinkBeat on 1/27/16, 9:40 PM

    Dell / EMC / Vmware Borlanding all over again.