VMware Workstation Shifting from Proprietary Code to Using Upstream KVM

[tw04]

>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.

[jchw]

Probably true, although I do still count it as a win. It's less out-of-tree kernel modules to deal with. Presumably, this also means you can use KVM/libvirt virtual machines alongside VMWare virtual machines in the future.

Now we just need Oracle to decide not to want to maintain the Virtualbox kernel modules. Seeing as someone already did most of the work of porting it, they don't even need to do a lot of work to make it happen.

[intelVISA]

Why pay when better code's free?

Plus KVM is GPL right? That means more open source code (albeit spaghetti, given the origin)

[walterbell]

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.

[jsheard]

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.

[patmorgan23]

Windows basically always runs inside a hyper-v VM these days.

[burnt-resistor]

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.

[belthesar]

Ironically, x86 performance of Win applications on UTM is faster when using Windows' ARM to x86 translation rather than using QEMU virtualization, because it can do Rosetta 2 like translation of only the specific application code and not the dependent libraries.

[stuaxo]

Made the mistake of UTM on my dev machine in a job up to about a year ago.

It might be better now, but it wasn't ready at that point, I'll probably check it out again in a few years time.

The speed for Arm Linux on a MacOS host was OK, but the hard locks I was hitting multiple times a day, not so much.

[CommanderData]

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.

[lmz]

Wouldn't KVM be part of the kernel interface to userspace? The emulated devices aren't really part of KVM, are they?

[yjftsjthsd-h]

I believe (IANAL) the implementation of KVM is GPL because it's part of Linux, but that's not viral into user space.

[RachelF]

I wonder how this will work on Windows Workstation hosts?

[TowerTall]

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.

[ipython]

Sign up on their portal with a new burner email account and use that to request the license. Their site is totally broken for existing users and you’ll just end up going in circles with their support.

[sturadnidge]

I didn't have any trouble, although I have owned full versions of Workstation and Fusion in the past. Having said that, their licensing portal is awful and i wouldnt be surprised at all if things were getting lost somewhere in the back end.

[guiambros]

Broadcom licensing site is a disaster. The usability is terrible; took me an hour going in circles, but eventually I was able to find where to click. It was something completely unintuitive. But it works. Maybe. Sometimes.

[arunc]

Wouldn't that violate GPL?

[bpye]

It looks like they are upstreaming the kernel side changes, I don't see why the usermode side couldn't be proprietary?

[anonymousiam]

Maybe not, but they do have a history of poor behavior:

https://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-developer-abandons-vmwar...

[nobody9999]

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?

[nineteen999]

Its worth noting that Workstation and ESXi formats are essentially different anyway, traditionally you needed to use VMware converter to convert between the formats. Pretty sure KVM has supported the VMware disk formats forever so you probably can already migrate the VM's without too much work (just installing a few drivers inside the guest OS etc).

[cebert]

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

[mcflubbins]

This looks like a cost saving maneuver to me. Why do the heavy innovation lifting on your own proprietary virtualization technology when you can have the community do it for you, for free? You can layoff several high-cost developers and stop innovating while extracting as much money from your current customers as possible.

[musicale]

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