Following a period of uncertainty and user frustration after its acquisition by Broadcom, VMware has announced a surprising move – making its professional-grade desktop hypervisor applications, VMware Fusion Pro and Workstation Pro, available for free for personal use. This decision comes after a period of backlash surrounding the discontinuation of free player versions and a shift towards a subscription model for commercial users.
Previously, VMware offered free “Player” versions of both Fusion and Workstation, catering to individual users who wanted to run virtual machines on their computers. However, these free options were discontinued as part of Broadcom’s integration plans. The news sparked concern and frustration within the tech community, particularly among students, educators, and hobbyists who relied on the free software for learning and personal projects.
VMware’s latest announcement seems to be a course correction, addressing user concerns and offering a free tier for personal users. Both Fusion Pro and Workstation Pro are now available for download with a “Free Personal Use” license. These full-featured applications offer a significant upgrade compared to the discontinued player versions, providing users with advanced functionalities for managing and running virtual machines.
This move is likely an effort to appease the personal user base that felt left behind by the initial changes. While the free tier doesn’t extend to commercial use cases, it offers a robust solution for individuals seeking a powerful and feature-rich virtualization tool for personal projects or learning purposes. Businesses will still require paid subscriptions to leverage these applications in commercial environments.
While the long-term implications of this decision remain to be seen, it does signal a potential shift in VMware’s approach under Broadcom’s ownership. By offering a free tier for personal users, VMware can potentially retain a strong foothold in the educational and hobbyist communities, fostering brand loyalty and building a pipeline of future professional users.
For individual users, this is a welcome change. The free access to professional-grade virtualization software opens doors for experimentation, learning, and exploring the world of virtual machines. Whether it’s running a specific operating system for testing purposes, creating isolated development environments, or simply experiencing the benefits of virtualization, the free tier of VMware Fusion Pro and Workstation Pro empowers individuals to explore these functionalities without financial barriers.
Following its acquisition of VMware in November 2023, Broadcom has decided to discontinue the free version of VMware’s ESXi hypervisor. This decision, outlined in a knowledge base article, aligns with Broadcom’s termination of perpetual licensing, marking the Free ESXi Hypervisor as End Of General Availability (EOGA).
The announcement states, “VMware vSphere Hypervisor (free edition) is no longer available on the VMware website,” impacting versions ESXi 7.x and 8.x. While the free version had limitations, such as restrictions on cores and memory, it was popular among hobbyists and testers due to its advanced management features.
Despite discontinuing the free version, users can still access the hypervisor through VMware User Group ‘advantage’ licensing. Broadcom has clarified that no substitute product is offered for the free version.
This decision is part of Broadcom’s broader strategy, seen in a list of discontinued services on the company’s blog. Among 59 products no longer available as standalone options, only 32 have received a replacement or add-on product. Broadcom’s recent changes include setting a minimum requirement of 3,500 cores running VMware Cloud Foundation for inclusion in its cloud partner program and terminating perpetual licenses in favour of subscriptions.
This move and other significant alterations have stirred customer dissatisfaction, prompting some to explore alternative solutions.
In a broader context, Broadcom’s $61 billion acquisition of VMware has led to substantial transformations, including layoffs, the end of perpetual licenses, and now, the discontinuation of the free ESXi hypervisor. These strategic moves indicate Broadcom’s intent to reshape VMware’s portfolio but have also raised concerns among users about the rapid and impactful changes.
For those who utilized the free ESXi hypervisor, the options for migration to alternative products like Proxmox, XCP-ng, or even the Hyper-V capabilities in Windows 10 and 11 Pro versions are suggested. As Broadcom steers VMware towards a new direction, users are advised to adapt to the evolving landscape of virtualization solutions.
The landscape of work is evolving rapidly, and technology is at the forefront of this transformation. To navigate the complexities of hybrid work, VMware has unveiled a series of innovative AI integrations within its Anywhere Workspace platform, an integral part of the VMware Cross-Cloud services portfolio. These integrations leverage the power of data, intelligence, and automation to enhance employee experience, bolster vulnerability management, and streamline application lifecycle management. In essence, VMware Anywhere Workspace is designed to provide a seamless and secure workspace accessible from any device or location.
A Holistic Approach to Enhancing Employee Experience
VMware is a pioneer in harnessing data and automation to elevate the employee and IT experience. The latest enhancements include Insights and Playbooks that utilize expanded data sources and advanced machine learning algorithms to enhance the Digital Employee Experience (DEX). This broader access to data strengthens VMware Insights and enables more effective issue remediation.
One noteworthy addition is app performance scores, supplementing the existing experience scores for mobile devices, desktops, and virtual environments. This means that if a SaaS app experiences downtime, IT is immediately alerted, and employees are automatically informed, eliminating the need for cumbersome support tickets.
But it’s not just about providing more data to IT; it’s about empowering them to work smarter. VMware’s AI-driven Insights now incorporate anomaly detection, identifying potential experience issues for frontline devices and VDI environments, in addition to mobile and desktop setups. This latest announcement introduces Playbooks, enabling IT to create step-by-step remediation workflows for efficient incident resolution. Success rate analytics automate the resolution process over time.
George March, Manager of Digital Workspace and Development at USA Health, praised Workspace ONE intelligence for streamlining lifecycle management and enhancing security. Their roadmap includes implementing the ITSM connector, and with the addition of remediation playbooks, they anticipate further streamlining their help desk support teams’ workflows.
Partnering for Security and Manageability
End-to-end manageability and security for distributed workforces are paramount. VMware recognizes the importance of collaboration with best-of-breed partners to achieve these goals. To this end, VMware has expanded its partnership with Intel to create a cloud-native integration of Workspace ONE with Intel vPro®. This integration enables secure and remote device management directly from the cloud, eliminating the need for additional on-premises infrastructure and management software.
With this integration, IT teams gain below-the-OS vulnerability insights for vPro-powered devices, enhancing security. It also provides centralized visibility into these devices, accelerating patch remediation cycles for devices beyond office perimeters, even when they are powered off. This results in improved security and compliance, with higher patch saturation and minimal disruption to employee productivity.
Simplifying Virtual Environments with Modern App Management
Managing and delivering applications across various virtual environments has grown increasingly complex. Silos of legacy tools have compounded inefficiencies. VMware has introduced Apps on Demand, powered by VMware App Volumes, to address this challenge. It unifies app management and intelligently deploys apps to published app hosts or non-persistent desktop environments based on real-time app usage.
Moreover, VMware is expanding App Volumes support to deliver apps on demand to persistent virtual desktops. This automation of app delivery streamlines processes with remarkable compatibility and cost savings. VMware App Volumes is the only solution capable of delivering and managing apps across multiple virtual desktop and app deployments.
Boeing’s Remarkable Hybrid Work Transformation
Boeing, a global leader in aerospace, leverages VMware Workspace ONE to support its extensive global workforce. Comprising 140,000 employees across the globe, Boeing’s workforce plays a crucial role in developing, manufacturing, and servicing aerospace and defence products.
Recognized as a ‘Hybrid Workforce Innovator,’ Boeing has utilized VMware Anywhere Workspace to enable its employees to work from anywhere globally. This transformation has not only improved the user experience but has also fortified security for devices and applications.
Kristina Ross, Boeing Workplace Solutions Director for Research & Technology, emphasized that Workspace ONE has streamlined their transition to modern management, enhanced scalability, and shifted their focus from infrastructure to business-facing solutions.
VMware Inc. and NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA) are expanding their strategic partnership. Their mission? To ready the multitude of enterprises dependent on VMware’s cloud infrastructure for the imminent generative AI era.
Generative AI, the driving force behind intelligent chatbots, assistants, search engines, and summarization tools, is revolutionizing industries. VMware Private AI Foundation with NVIDIA is designed to democratize this transformation. It offers an integrated solution, seamlessly combining generative AI software with NVIDIA’s advanced accelerated computing, all within VMware Cloud Foundation, optimized for AI applications.
The synergy between generative AI and multi-cloud environments is profound. Enterprise data resides in various locations, including data centres, edge devices, and diverse cloud platforms. VMware and NVIDIA aim to empower enterprises to harness generative AI while preserving data privacy, ensuring security, and retaining control.
Enterprises are in a race to implement generative AI, with the potential to contribute up to a staggering $4.4 trillion annually to the global economy. VMware Private AI Foundation with NVIDIA is stepping in to empower them to expedite this journey. It enables enterprises to customize large language models (LLMs), construct secure and private models for internal use, offer generative AI as a service, and scale inference workloads securely.
With emerging concerns surrounding data privacy and security with deploying Generative AI tools like ChatGPT at an organisational level, VMware Private AI Foundation with NVIDIA empowers organizations to use the full capabilities of Generative AI without the worry of data leaks. Enterprises can deploy AI services close to their data, safeguarding data privacy and ensuring secure access.
It also provides them with diverse options for constructing and running models, including leading OEM hardware configurations without ruling out the potential integration with public clouds. This choice doesn’t come at the expense of performance with NVIDIA’s accelerated infrastructure. It promises performance equal to or even surpassing bare-metal solutions.
When enterprises are ready to scale, they can do so seamlessly and without much hassle. GPU scaling optimizations in virtualized environments facilitate the efficient scaling of AI workloads across multiple nodes. Scaling and implementation costs can also be minimized through VMware Private AI Foundation with NVIDIA. This is thanks to resource optimization and a shared resource environment fostered by the platform. In fact, the platform is built with fast prototyping capabilities with pre-installed frameworks and libraries allowing enterprises to fail quickly and achieve development milestones at an accelerated rate.
Aside from this, the platform will be deployed on performance-optimized NVMe storage and GPUDirect® storage over RDMA for seamless data transfer. Networking performance is also sustained and accelerated with deep integration between vSphere and NVIDIA NVSwitch™ technology ensuring efficient multi-GPU execution.
The platform integrates NVIDIA NeMo, a cloud-native framework simplifying the creation, customization, and deployment of generative AI models. NeMo offers customization frameworks, guardrail toolkits, data curation tools, and pre-trained models. It provides enterprises with an efficient, cost-effective, and expeditious path to adopting generative AI. For production deployment, NeMo leverages TensorRT for Large Language Models (TRT-LLM), optimizing inference performance on the latest LLMs on NVIDIA GPUs.
VMware Private AI Foundation with NVIDIA receives robust support from Dell Technologies, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and Lenovo. These partners will offer systems equipped with NVIDIA L40S GPUs, NVIDIA BlueField®-3 DPUs, and NVIDIA ConnectX®-7 SmartNICs. These components will supercharge enterprise LLM customization and inference workloads.
VMware aims to release VMware Private AI Foundation with NVIDIA in early 2024, marking the continuation of a decade-long partnership that has optimized VMware’s cloud infrastructure to run NVIDIA AI Enterprise with the performance of bare metal.
VMWorld is happening now and coincidently, NVIDIA’s GPU Technology Conference is also happening. Both are happening online, obviously with the current pandemic situation. In NVIDIA’s most recent keynote, they made an announcement to tell the world that they have just formed a partnership with VMWare to enhance their virtualisation capabilities via NVIDIA’s new GPU based computing solutions.
Today’s start of the show though is not NVIDIA, although they have made some very interesting announcements and progress. Today sees VMWare embracing Kubernetes as a big part of their business. Today is the day of Tanzu.
Kubernetes
Source: Kubernetes
What is Kubernetes? First of all, no; this is not the first time we look into the technology. Secondly, the technology is nothing new, Google has been playing with Kubernetes for the longest time, and other solutions providers have hopped on to the technology for years now.
Kubernetes, in the words of Red Hat, is a container orchestration platform. The keyword, that I missed out on purpose, is Open Source. That also means that anyone has access to it, improve on it, and improvise it for their own use. It is a technology developed by Google engineers for Google’s own use at one point, but because Google is Google, they made it an open source platform.
In simpler words, Kubernetes group processes and application databases into cubes (or containers). These cubes can be called upon whenever an application requires a certain data or run certain processes. That also means that you do not need to necessarily store your application database with your application. It can be kept and shifted around anywhere, even on cloud. It is even clever enough to stack and unstack itself depending on requirements and loads on your hardware. If something fails, you do not lose all your data, because containers. This is the magic of Kubernetes, and it could benefit plenty of enterprises.
The VMware Tanzu
Source: VMware
This is where VMware’s Tanzu comes in. The Tanzu portfolio is not exactly a pure Kubernetes workflow platform. It runs microservices, other sort of containers and Kubernetes as well. To put it plainly, it is an application breakdown tool. It breaks down a large application or database into smaller containers, run them as microservices or work with them as Kubernetes containers, and you get a service that is accessible not only in your office, but at the café down the road as well.
Yes, it sounds generally like what other container type application and tool does. Because it is exactly that but made native to VMWare’s tools. Tools like this allow companies to add capabilities to their applications and processes while keeping them running in tip top conditions. They call this DevOps.
The whole idea of running Tanzu on the VMware platform is to quickly deploy your applications on cloud. Because it is VMware as well, Tanzu is specifically built on Kubernetes to enhance their virtualisation solutions like vSphere and VMware Cloud Foundation. That also means that Tanzu is a cloud solution more than anything. It is also technically a Kubernetes management tool to simplify Kubernetes for users. So, it helps you, as VMware’s clients (if you are, when you are, whichever it may be) get started with Kubernetes nearly on the get go.
They may be a little late to the game of deploying Kubernetes and even fully harnessing the power of Kubernetes. They are also not going to be the last adopters of Kubernetes. In some sense too, they are simplifying Kubernetes by a factor of 10 for their customers.
Source: IT Hollow
In this case as well, customers might already have their own Kubernetes and container management tools in their workflow at this point. VMware says that customers still can benefit from Tanzu even if they have a Kubernetes workflow already. According to VMware, Tanzu does not just stop at Kubernetes. It is a suite of tools designed to ease workloads and centralise management efforts for customers. In that sense, integrating Tanzu into an existing Kubernetes workload and process is just a matter of matching what is required via Tanzu’s Mission Control platform.
Why Tanzu and Kubernetes?
Here is the thing though, how does this change our lives? How does VMware with Kubernetes power change our lives? After all, we are all just end-users.
If you work in a corporate environment, at this time of Pandemic, you would most likely be spending more time working remotely more than anything else. Imagine yourself, multiplied by more than a few hundred. There are hundreds, or even thousands of you and your colleagues trying to access your company’s intranet systems. You and your colleagues are going to be accessing the company’s systems to simply key in new data, or pull a previous data, or even share some work information with your colleagues 20KM away.
Imagine if you need to access the whole chunk of applications to do any of that. Imagine if all your colleagues need to access a single application server for all their minor processes too. That could slow down your entire workflow. Kubernetes and container platforms help spread that workload to ease load on a single server and ensure that everyone gets to do what they need to do without overloading your PC and the cloud platform.
Essentially, this is also kind of how your smartphone app works. Your smartphone apps access what you ask it to access when you need it. That way, it saves plenty of storage space in your smartphone, and ensure that millions of others can also access the app and its services when there is demand.
So, why is Tanzu important? It allows your company to do exactly whatever that we have just explained and described. Except that your organisation’s IT department can do it faster, from a single management platform instead of accessing a completely different system. With vSphere, the management can be done across multiple server sites too, thanks to VMware’s know how in machine virtualisation. All this, just so that you will not notice any difference when you work from home, and in the office.
To know more about VMware, their services and solutions, and Tanzu, you can head over to their website.
