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We’re thrilled to announce a significant change that reflects our commitment to making VMware Fusion and VMware Workstation more accessible than ever. Starting November 11, 2024, these powerful desktop hypervisor products will be available for free to everyone—commercial, educational, and personal users alike…
* Great move for current subscribers and opens a new choice for VM users.
Is it really a “great move” as you say ?
Will Broadcom discontinue further development of VMware Workstation and VMware Fusion after making such a move?
Or will it become more like Virtualbox, also free to use with continued development?
Here is what Günter Born says on his blog :
https://borncity.com/win/2024/11/12/vmware-fusion-and-workstation-now-free-for-all/
However, if I summarize the information from the above text, VMware should soon discontinue the further development of desktop hypervisors – surprises not excluded.
I guess we will have to wait and see.
Hope for the best. Prepare for the worst.
It took some digging in their forum, but someone had a similar question to yours and this is the link that they were given: https://knowledge.broadcom.com/external/article/368667/download-and-license-information-for-vmw.html.
VMware Workstation 17.6.3 and VMware Fusion 13.6.3 have been released :
https://techdocs.broadcom.com/us/en/vmware-cis/desktop-hypervisors/workstation-pro/17-0/release-notes/vmware-workstation-1763-pro-release-notes.html
https://techdocs.broadcom.com/us/en/vmware-cis/desktop-hypervisors/fusion-pro/13-0/release-notes/vmware-fusion-1363-release-notes.html
These are the first releases after the announcement of “Free for All Users” back in November 2024 and the release of the first “Free” versions 17.6.2 and 13.6.2 in December 2024, so the development of these products goes on, for now.
Workstation and Fusion are now the so-called “Free for All Users” but Broadcom still put in various blocks to hide the downloads of these so-called Free-Tier products.
When I attempted to login to Broadcom, I was told my account was “locked” when it was not before. OK, this was apparently due to some sort of “maintenance”, and I was successful in unlocking the account by following the on-screen instruction to send a link to my email account.
After I successfully login, I tried to find the downloads but was unable to locate them. Finally I found a download link in a support article but after I clicked on it, it told me I could not download it now because I needed to be “screened”. When I agreed to this “screening”, it required me to input my address again, and I was certain I did this once before on Broadcom.
Frustrated and not wanting to do this again, I declined and left, and eventually found a download link from the Internet Archive for both the full versions of VMware Workstation 17.6.3 and VMware Fusion 13.6.3 :
https://archive.org/details/vmware-workstation-full-17.6.3-24583834
By the way, you can also download the “Core” versions of VMware Workstation and VMware Fusion (lacking the VMware Tools isos, including some of the older versions that still require keys) from here :
https://softwareupdate.vmware.com/cds/vmw-desktop/
Click on fusion to download Fusion and ws to download Workstation.
Hope for the best. Prepare for the worst.
Just tested the download from : https://softwareupdate.vmware.com/cds/vmw-desktop/ws/17.6.3/24583834/windows/core/VMware-workstation-17.6.3-24583834.exe.tar (use 7-Zip or WinRAR to extract).
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