https://blogs.vmware.com/cloud-foundation/2024/11/11/vmware-fusion-and-workstation-are-now-free-for-all-users/

Interesting to see some good licensing news coming out of
VMWare/Broadcom, but concerned that they're doing this in advance of
them abandoning the desktop virtualization space.



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Hello poindexter,

On Wed, Nov 13 2024 08:59:03 -0600, you wrote:

https://blogs.vmware.com/cloud-foundation/2024/11/11/vmware-fusion-and-workstation-are-now-free-for-all-users/

Interesting to see some good licensing news coming out of
VMWare/Broadcom, but concerned that they're doing this in advance of
them abandoning the desktop virtualization space.

Definitely. One year after taking it away from us, they're going to give it back. Why is them possibly taking it away /again/ at all concerning? I'd enjoy it while it lasts, if you wish to do so. If not to at least get a newer copy of something that will last you, free, for years. :)

Regards,
Nick

... He who laughs last, thinks slowest.
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Re: Re: VMWare Fusion and Workstation now FREE
By: Accession to poindexter FORTRAN on Wed Nov 13 2024 02:36 pm

Definitely. One year after taking it away from us, they're going to give it back. Why is them possibly taking it away /again/ at all concerning? I'd enjoy it while it lasts, if you wish to do so. If not to at least get a newe copy of something that will last you, free, for years. :)

yeah, I was a huge VMWare Workstation fan for years - even ran the BBS on it for some time. It might be too little, too late for me - I have Proxmox running in a homelab and VirtualBox running for a couple of desktop VMs.
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Hello poindexter,

On Wed, Nov 13 2024 20:31:33 -0600, you wrote:

yeah, I was a huge VMWare Workstation fan for years - even ran the BBS on it for some time. It might be too little, too late for me - I have Proxmox running in a homelab and VirtualBox running for a couple of desktop VMs.

That's fine. You made the switch to another great product. You really don't have a reason to switch back.

In my case, I'm still running ESXi 6.5, it would be nice if I could do an easy upgrade (although, I doubt it since I think they were up to like 8.0 or something when they put a price tag on it), without having to move all my crap somewhere else, upgrade, then move everything back. If that's the case, I'll probably just stick with this one until the server dies. Just start fresh with a new server.

Regards,
Nick

... He who laughs last, thinks slowest.
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On Wed, 13 Nov 2024 06:59:03 -0800
"poindexter FORTRAN" (46:1/115)
<poindexter.FORTRAN@f115.n1.z46.fidonet> wrote:

https://blogs.vmware.com/cloud-foundation/2024/11/11/vmware-fusion-and-workstation-are-now-free-for-all-users/

Interesting to see some good licensing news coming out of
VMWare/Broadcom, but concerned that they're doing this in advance of
them abandoning the desktop virtualization space.

Having never used or seen VM Fusion or Workstation, I assume they're
similar to something like VirtualBox? If so, what is the advantage of
using them over said product?
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Hello nelgin,

On Fri, Nov 22 2024 16:06:43 -0600, you wrote:

Having never used or seen VM Fusion or Workstation, I assume they're
similar to something like VirtualBox? If so, what is the advantage of
using them over said product?

IMO, absolutely nothing. I originally got excited until I realized they aren't anything like VMWare ESXi was.

For now, the best (new install) virtualization platforms to run on bare metal are probably Proxmox, XCP-ng, and whatever that one is called that you can build on a base BSD install - and in that order.

If you still have VMWare ESXi installed like I do, it works perfectly fine still. :)

Regards,
Nick

... He who laughs last, thinks slowest.
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On Fri, 22 Nov 2024 18:02:07 -0600
"Accession" (46:1/700) <Accession@f700.n1.z46.fidonet> wrote:

Hello nelgin,

On Fri, Nov 22 2024 16:06:43 -0600, you wrote:

Having never used or seen VM Fusion or Workstation, I assume they're similar to something like VirtualBox? If so, what is the advantage
of using them over said product?

IMO, absolutely nothing. I originally got excited until I realized
they aren't anything like VMWare ESXi was.

For now, the best (new install) virtualization platforms to run on
bare metal are probably Proxmox, XCP-ng, and whatever that one is
called that you can build on a base BSD install - and in that order.

If you still have VMWare ESXi installed like I do, it works perfectly
fine still. :)

I don't have a hypervisor at home other then Virtualbox on my PC which
seems to do fine. I was thinking I'd play games and do more stuff on my
linux box than I do, but I still seem to use Winderz more. I'd consider
it except I don't have a huge amount of memory and I seem to use disk
space like it's going out of fashion. It's really easier just to spin
up a Virtoualbox VM.
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Hello nelgin,

On Sat, Nov 23 2024 02:57:43 -0600, you wrote:

I don't have a hypervisor at home other then Virtualbox on my PC which
seems to do fine. I was thinking I'd play games and do more stuff on my
linux box than I do, but I still seem to use Winderz more. I'd consider
it except I don't have a huge amount of memory and I seem to use disk
space like it's going out of fashion. It's really easier just to spin
up a Virtoualbox VM.

If that's all you need, that's perfectly fine. I've never used these VMWare options mentioned, so I can't really compare them to Virtualbox. I'd imagine they're similar, though. I have Virtualbox installed here on my Windows PC just to test new OSes or whatever, so I don't have to install them on my production ESXi server since they're usually just temporary.

Regards,
Nick

... He who laughs last, thinks slowest.
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nelgin wrote to All <=-

Having never used or seen VM Fusion or Workstation, I assume they're similar to something like VirtualBox? If so, what is the advantage of using them over said product?

I ran Workstation and Fusion at work on 200 PCs and 1000 Macs, for a
time we needed to run Windows VMs in Macs to support our enterprise
apps. This was around 2010-2015.

Workstation was a much more polished product than Virtualbox when I
compared the two, but being able to migrate VMs from Workstation to ESXi
was pretty nice - as was being able to take live Snapshots. VB didn't do
that at the time; I don't see any option with the new VB I'm running
now.

Workstation and Fusion had unity mode, where you could run VM windowed apps
in your primary environment instead of in a window, which was pretty
nice. On a Mac, you could have Outlook for Windows running alongside
your Mac apps.

(This was before Outlook for Mac was around, there was a program called Entourage that was pretty poor by comparison to Outlook)

I had problems getting VM Workstation running under Linux, it was too
dependent on linux kernel versions - do an apt upgrade and VM
Workstation would break. Virtualbox didn't have that issue.

Virtualbox does shine in the number of pre-built vms floating around for download on the net.



... Adding on
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Accession wrote to nelgin <=-

For now, the best (new install) virtualization platforms to run on bare metal are probably Proxmox, XCP-ng, and whatever that one is called
that you can build on a base BSD install - and in that order.

If you still have VMWare ESXi installed like I do, it works perfectly
fine still. :)

Yeah, I'm re-licensing ESXi/vSphere at work, not worth migrating over to another platform. I'm tempted to look at XCP-ng, hear lots of good
things about it - but Proxmox just works!



... Adding on
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Hello Poindexter,

On Sat, Nov 23 2024 11:35:19 -0600, you wrote ..

Yeah, I'm re-licensing ESXi/vSphere at work, not worth migrating
over to another platform. I'm tempted to look at XCP-ng, hear lots
of good things about it - but Proxmox just works!

I took a look at XCP-ng, and it's not bad at all. I actually like the
fact that it has a decent command line UI installed on the host machine
- aside from the web access most of these platforms offer. In comparison
to Proxmox though, you're losing out on containers. I'm not sure how
that would currently affect me just yet (I don't think it really matters
much, since I currently don't use them), but it seems at the moment
there's much more community and helpful information out there on Proxmox
than there is XCP-ng.

I've also read up on the *BSD/bhyve hypervisor a bit, and have pushed
that aside since I'm at a time where I don't want to work for my
systems, but rather have them work for me. It seems very command line
oriented (maybe moreso at first, then you can add a GUI), and I'm just
not interested in doing all that.

They can be installed in Virtualbox, which is what I did with Proxmox
and XCP-ng just to check them out and get a gist of the initial
experience and comparison (without installing any actual VMs).

That said, looks like Proxmox just came out with an update (8.3) that
looks like they've added a few things.

Regards,
Nick

... He who laughs last, thinks slowest.
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On 23 Nov 2024, poindexter FORTRAN said the following...

I had problems getting VM Workstation running under Linux, it was too dependent on linux kernel versions - do an apt upgrade and VM
Workstation would break. Virtualbox didn't have that issue.

Just wanted to let you know that I was getting frustrated to no end about that as well. I'd get a kernel update, the system would reboot for whatever reason (power loss, usually), and it would fail to launch my VMs, a lot of them with BBSes or whatnot.

ChatGPT actually came up with a solution to fix that so that if a newer kernel was installed (like say, with unattended upgrades on an unmonitored machine) and when next you reboot it would automatically run the update for VMware and then your VMs could launch. Lemme see if I can dredge that up.

Here we go. Here are the steps on Ubuntu to get it to update automatically with root priveleges:

https://pastebin.com/TGvtjsRe

Freakin' lifesaver.

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Accession wrote to poindexter FORTRAN <=-

I took a look at XCP-ng, and it's not bad at all. I actually like the
fact that it has a decent command line UI installed on the host machine
- aside from the web access most of these platforms offer. In
comparison to Proxmox though, you're losing out on containers.

Proxmox is just QVM/QEMU behind the GUI, and there are a decent amount
of commands available by SSHing into the box (and it's based on
Debian, so more commonality there)

sure how that would currently affect me just yet (I don't think it
really matters much, since I currently don't use them), but it seems at the moment there's much more community and helpful information out
there on Proxmox than there is XCP-ng.

The Proxmox helper scripts have quite a few homelab services available
to install as LXCs, and they take less resources than setting up a
docker host and running docker containers. Networking is easier since
you've got one IP address per container per app.

That said, looks like Proxmox just came out with an update (8.3) that looks like they've added a few things.

I really want to get 3 micro systems and set up ceph and zfs on it, with
proper HA - not that I need that at home, but it'd still be neat to
have.




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Hello Poindexter,

On Sun, Nov 24 2024 11:07:30 -0600, you wrote ..

Proxmox is just QVM/QEMU behind the GUI, and there are a decent
amount of commands available by SSHing into the box (and it's based
on Debian, so more commonality there)

Whereas, I believe XCP-ng is built on a severely customized CentOS to
the point where they can basically just call it their own distro. I
guess there was some community worry when CentOS changed things up for
v9 but these guys seemed to have no worry whatsoever.

Definitely seems legit no matter which one you choose, as they both seem pretty promising for the future.

The Proxmox helper scripts have quite a few homelab services
available to install as LXCs, and they take less resources than
setting up a docker host and running docker containers. Networking
is easier since you've got one IP address per container per app.

As it's a homelab, I probably don't dive in far enough to even utilize
any of that stuff. I just need to be able to install it, and then
install whatever VMs I want or need to, on it. Resource consumption is
the least of my worries currently.

So without the need of containers et al, maybe I could get away with
either one. I'll have to do more studying up on which one is easier to
update as well as migrate to and from.

I really want to get 3 micro systems and set up ceph and zfs on it,
with proper HA - not that I need that at home, but it'd still be
neat to have.

I don't know about all of that. I would much rather put my time into
other things, to be honest. :)

Regards,
Nick

... He who laughs last, thinks slowest.
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Hello Accession!

24 Nov 24 12:02, you wrote to poindexter FORTRAN:

The Proxmox helper scripts have quite a few homelab services
available to install as LXCs, and they take less resources than
setting up a docker host and running docker containers. Networking
is easier since you've got one IP address per container per app.

[...]

So without the need of containers et al, maybe I could get away with either one. I'll have to do more studying up on which one is easier to update as well as migrate to and from.

One of the things that LXC's use is the server's own kernel.

Do you need a different kernel for your workload than what is in the host? VM Do you need live migration? VM
Do you need every ounce of performance and you are willing to sacrifice some security? CT
Do you need a non-Linux OS such as Windows, FreeBSD or Hackintosh? VM

A LXC container pretty much behaves as a TTY-only Linux VM. The difference is that a LXC will share its kernel with the Proxmox
host and as such, any hardware-level vulnerability in the host will expose the LXC CT and vice-versa.





Vorlon


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Hello Vorlon,

On Sun, Nov 24 2024 17:16:08 -0600, you wrote ..

One of the things that LXC's use is the server's own kernel.

Ah, I didn't know this part. I thought you install one VM (for example,
Debian) and then your containers ran on and around /that/ kernel. Not
the actual kernel of the host (ie Proxmox).

Do you need a different kernel for your workload than what is in the
host? VM

Yes.

Do you need live migration? VM

This would be nice, also.

Do you need every ounce of performance and you are willing to
sacrifice some security? CT

No. Performance is not an issue, but security is.

Do you need a non-Linux OS such as Windows, FreeBSD or Hackintosh?
VM

Sure, but not totally necessary.

A LXC container pretty much behaves as a TTY-only Linux VM. The
difference is that a LXC will share its kernel with the Proxmox host
and as such, any hardware-level vulnerability in the host will
expose the LXC CT and vice-versa.

The debate for me isn't really Proxmox vs XCP-ng, as they both would be
great for my use case. I guess I was looking at if I needed containers
or not, which I don't, and never have. Either or, both of the above do
VMs perfectly fine, Proxmox just offers containers, whereas XCP-ng doesn't.

Thanks for the explanation, it definitely gave me some new information I didn't already know!

Regards,
Nick

... He who laughs last, thinks slowest.
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Yeah, I'm re-licensing ESXi/vSphere at work, not worth migrating over to another platform. I'm tempted to look at XCP-ng, hear lots of good
things about it - but Proxmox just works!

i'm in the process of porting a bunch of image manipulation tools over to proxmox because our customer base is looking around for alternatives. there's another one i'm a little curious about called nutanix. it seems like it's growing in popularity, but have yet to actually speak to anyone using it.

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maskreet wrote to poindexter FORTRAN <=-

https://pastebin.com/TGvtjsRe

Freakin' lifesaver.

Thanks!



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jinkusu wrote to poindexter FORTRAN <=-

alternatives. there's another one i'm a little curious about called nutanix. it seems like it's growing in popularity, but have yet to actually speak to anyone using it.

I'm running 45 sites on Nutanix with around 18-20 VMS per site - fire away
with your questions!

Nutanix is a hypervisor-agnostic hyperconverged environment - it uses
AOS, it's own hypervisor, ESXi or Hyper-V, and wraps it all around a
redundant hardware base. From what I understand, it started out as a GUI wrapped around KVM/qemu, just like Proxmox - but it's grown
significantly since.

A Nutanix chassis consists of a backplane with typically 2-3
self-contained nodes, with redundant memory and power supplies. The idea
is that you could wire a Nutanix chassis to the network in a remote site
and manage the entire thing from one console.

We have an network team and a firewall team, so we're not using it
anywhere near where we could. They're managing external firewalls, so
we're not using that portion of Nutanix.

We replaced a Simplivity environment with ESXi, then replaced it with
Nutanix - mostly for cost reasons, but it's a pretty nice setup overall,
with great support.

High availability works the way it should - we've had DIMM failures and
the VMs move to the other nodes and it flags us via the console and
email.

It's mostly linux-like at the command line, but they have a habit of odd service names for everything - which takes some getting used to. Chronos, Cassandra, Zeus, Curator...

The only thing I've been disappointed is DarkSite, their patch
distribution system. Our systems aren't connected to the internet, so we
wanted to have one system manage patches across all of the clusters.
With most patch management systems, you list the OSes you want and it'll download the patches and mark them for approval. You test with a QA
group then push the patches to production, which pushes them out to all
of the other systems.

With DarkSite, you need to manually select and download the patches to
your DS server, then they're available to the network- and manually
managing versions and software is done outside of DarkSite.

I'm used to Microsoft's SCCM and SUS, which are a lot more automatic.




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Hello Accession!

24 Nov 24 19:59, you wrote to me:

One of the things that LXC's use is the server's own kernel.

Ah, I didn't know this part. I thought you install one VM (for
example, Debian) and then your containers ran on and around /that/
kernel. Not the actual kernel of the host (ie Proxmox).

A lot of people don't see this, and then get into trouble due to the way lxc's work.

[...]

A LXC container pretty much behaves as a TTY-only Linux VM. The
difference is that a LXC will share its kernel with the Proxmox host
and as such, any hardware-level vulnerability in the host will
expose the LXC CT and vice-versa.

The debate for me isn't really Proxmox vs XCP-ng, as they both would
be great for my use case. I guess I was looking at if I needed
containers or not, which I don't, and never have. Either or, both of
the above do VMs perfectly fine, Proxmox just offers containers,
whereas XCP-ng doesn't.

Thanks for the explanation, it definitely gave me some new information
I didn't already know!

Yeah, when I first started playing around with VM's (LXC's) via a provider I quickly came to see the downside of them.. I think I
initially chose lxc due to the cost.. Then it was chalenge to get some things working that I wanted (Ie: VPN).

Ever since that time, I've chosen real VM's and have been able to treate each of them like they are real computers.



Vorlon


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Hello Vorlon,

On Mon, Nov 25 2024 17:52:00 -0600, you wrote ..

Yeah, when I first started playing around with VM's (LXC's) via a
provider I quickly came to see the downside of them.. I think I
initially chose lxc due to the cost.. Then it was chalenge to get
some things working that I wanted (Ie: VPN).

Ever since that time, I've chosen real VM's and have been able to
treate each of them like they are real computers.

I can definitely see the downside to them. I guess I've never really had
the chance to find out for myself, as I started with VMs and they have
never steered me wrong, so I've stuck with them the entire time. :)

Regards,
Nick

... He who laughs last, thinks slowest.
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