I assume everyone saw KKR buying ex-vmware desktop products?

[slgarwood]

KKR is a 'buy and strip value then sell' hedge fund (see Sears for example). I am jumping to Parallels - hopefully that will last a little longer.

Has anyone seen any news about Fusion support staff, product manager, future road map?

Fusion has always been a good product in a niche market - with Apple providing the guts of a VM now, just about anyone can roll some Swift code and build a vm platform.

https://www.theregister.com/2024/02/26/kkr_vmware_euc_acquisitioj/

[Technogeezer · Accepted solution]

Michael Roy (Fusion and Workstation product manager) indicated in his blog post back in December https://blogs.vmware.com/teamfusion/2023/12/a-new-chapter.html that Workstation and Fusion are now part of the Cloud Foundation division which is not being divested. KKR is buying the End-User Computing division which includes Horizon and WorkspaceONE. Note that none of the press releases from KKR and VMware about the deal mention that Fusion and Workstation are included. 

VMware is very tight lipped about internal organizations and future product plans. It does appear that Michael is remaining as Fusion product manager.

However, this being Broadcom, I trust them less than KKR. There's a part of me that says if the products were divested, we'd either see increased investment and focus on the products, or they'd die quickly. VMware's closed mouth attitude prolongs the agony of what they're going to do - and is the status quo going to change. VMware really needs to drop regular blog posts about what's happening and what they're going to do. Then deliver on that. 

I won't rest until I see the deal closed. Like I said, I don't trust Broadcom. 

The problem with Apple's virtualization framework is that while it is easy to write a wrapper around Apple's code (cough Parallels cough) it is not mature compared to Fusion. Apple's virtual disk performance is nothing to write home about. There's also missing functionality as well. Apple's frameworks also don't officially support Windows - just macOS and Linux. Today Apple's framework is "good enough", and that's where Fusion and Parallels have to step up their game and show why a paid product is better.

For my use, UTM is a better deal at a much, much lower cost. Supports Windows, Linux and macOS. Doesn't have all the bells and whistles, though, but is appearing to be "good enough". Your usage may vary, of course.

[slgarwood]

Sound advice until we get a firmer direction and long term plans. I personally dislike Paralles even given the fact I have used their ancestors back to the Virtual PC days. I still may have a VPC CD around somewhere.

VMware and/or UTM fills the bill for me for now. 

[RDPetruska]

If I were you, I'd grab all the old versions and archive them yourself while they're still available... the latest versions of Workstation and Fusion are absolute garbage.  I'm still sticking with version 16.1.2 for work on my 64-bit hosts, and 10.0.7 on my 32-bit hosts.  And I recently downloaded many of the older versions of the products.  VMware hasn't been good in QA and development for the past several years - and this Broadcom acquisition appears to only make matters worse for the entire company and product lines.

[scott28tt]

The desktop products are not part of the EUC business sell-off to KKR.

[ColoradoMarmot]

This post is a bit painful to write.  I’ve used Fusion since day one, helped build a massive Mac program around it, and am as much a fanboy as anyone.

But I’m running both now.  I still prefer Fusion because of its better isolation (parallels forces far too much host integration, and it’s a pain to disable it), but Parallels has significantly better performance and some basic features like shared folders that are critical for some of my workloads.

i also just switched my dad over to Parallels to do his taxes.  I had to move him to an ARM machine, and don’t like to switch things on him.  At this point, I couldn’t use Fusion because there’s basic features missing, and no apparent roadmap to get there, so that’s a permanent change.  I always pay for Fusion so the money is a wash.  And its pretty clear that the new overlords don’t care about that revenue, since I’m not one of their largest 2000 customers.

i get the forward looking statement problem, but given all of the other negative news about the acquisition in the media, VMware needs to set it aside and share the direction and plans.  In the absence of information, we’re starting to have to make assumptions that there is no future or plan.

Moving my last workloads is a big job, so I’m holding off for now.  But if we don’t get a tech preview that closes all those feature gaps, and fixes the bugs like the background process notification by July, I plan to migrate those too, either to parallels or to UTM (I’m starting to experiment with that now).

Sad that it’s come to this, but unless there’s a massive surprise coming in the next few months, I suspect I won’t be the only one,  fingers crossed for a surprise!

[Mikero]

Hey folks 😃

Let me shed a little bit of light here. (tl/dr; it's good news!)

First off, EUC is the group we were in when our esteemed Palo Alto engineers were laid off back in 2016. We recuperated, moved into the vSphere team, and now we're solidly within the VCF group at Broadcom. We've had renewed investment and interest from leadership.

From the outside in I imagine it looks slow and there's a lot of work to be done still, but it might not be obvious what it's like to maintain millions of lines of hypervisor + 4 unique abstractions of UI code with 20+ years of corner cases baked in. A lot of our work lately has been building new internal automation systems so we can catch bugs faster and eliminate regression for example. ARM really threw a wrench into things too given how tied to x86 vSphere/ESXi is (with whom we share hypervisor platform code).

We also had some key folks actually retire over the past few years, so with them went a lot of that institutional knowledge that had to be built back up. Sadly, one even passed away recently :.(

But...! That said, plans are being finalized... there's just a lot of other situations that the brass has been dealing with in merging the different "VMware" business groups into the new "VCF Division".

We are the smallest of potatoes within the new organization, and that actually works in everyones favor a bit. 

So as much as we're being reforged by Broadcom into something more sustainable long-term with less focus on hocky-stick growth and more on reliability, performance and technical excellence, we're also shaping what it means to be a part of the new world, bringing the VMware culture with us. 

To that end, I've actually taken on a new role within our VCF division whereby I'm charged with our overall Community strategy and effort. This includes VMUG, vExpert, these forums, and more. (Hence me being in sort of heads-down hands-on-keyboard mode for the past couple months... ). 

It's no small challenge for sure, but I think it's a reflection of the work we/I have done with Desktop Hypervisor product group, and so leadership wants to see us/me continue to deliver that vibe to the new VCF community as a whole.

So, while I can't say in this specific moment what the roadmap looks like, I can say that the innovation is continuing... I've seen some really nice demoes recently of long-sought-after features since M1,2,3 came out in the past couple weeks.

I've been working with/training our other PM for the past 2+ years and will still continue to advise on the desktop products, so folks here can still ping me and I can relay to the right engineering teams to fix bugs, etc.

But just to say... I've seen other products and teams get changed up, and it's never pleasant when 'its just business', but if we were going to get the axe it probably would have happened already. Instead we have a new mandate, more investment, and I have an expanded role.

I've been with VMware for 15 years now, and saw us go through other acquisitions which ultimately had neutral-to-negative effects for our products (apathy is a curse!). This is the only one where I've felt like we're doing the right things with the "VMware tech stack" as a whole, and I've never seen this kind of interest in the Desktop Hypervisor products before.

Lastly, and most importantly for me... I just want to express gratitude for this community. I literally started my career at VMware answering questions on these forums, and found within it a group of people who are passionate about technology, who get why virtualization (and desktop hypervisors!) are cool and what they provide the industry. I think ultimately we all just want to make the world a better place through technology, and that's something I take seriously.

I think folks will be pretty happy with the plan we're putting together, and I really can't wait to share! We're not quite at 'publish blog post with all the details', but we should be soon!

[Technogeezer]

Michael,

From the outside in I imagine it looks slow

Not to sound snarky, but that's the understatement of the year....

I've been working with/training our other PM for the past 2+ years

Hopefully we get a chance to meet the new PM soon. I hope that the person has your "the right stuff" attitude (and a thick skin) because there's a lot of pent-up "demand" in the user community (not only in the sales sense, but a focus on dealing with the technical debt of long-standing issues and missing features).

Yes, this is good news. And we're all waiting to see what you folks have up your sleeves. 

By the way, I thank you for all of your efforts, and I'm sure the rest of the community thanks you as well.  It must have seemed at times like you were trying to swim up-stream against the VMware establishment. It sure sounds like there now are people at the top that are listening.

so folks here can still ping me and I can relay to the right engineering teams to fix bugs, etc.

Somebody once told me "be careful what you ask for....".  😉 

I do ask for one favor, though. If we do ping you and someone from VMware says they're forwarding the issue on to the development teams, can soneone please provide some feedback here. Without any kind of feedback, people in the forum think that issues have fallen into a black hole - and that doesn't help perception that VMware isn't caring about the products. 

[CallistoJag]

Nice to see that it does not include Fusion and Workstation, as parallels is not something I want to buy into again.

[slgarwood]

That's my thinking too... I'll avoid Parallels if at all possible.

[slgarwood]

One question I have is security updates as they usually are posted including Workstation, Fusion, and ESXi ... see for exampleVMSA-2024-0006.1 - VMware ESXi, Workstation, and Fusion updates address multiple security vulnerabilities (CVE-2024-22252, CVE-2024-22253, CVE-2024-22254, CVE-2024-22255)

Will continue I hope - one of VMware's advantages over Parallels - they never say anything.

[ColoradoMarmot]

Thanks Michael, very much appreciate the update.  I'd regret having to move off Fusion completely - that's definitely in the 'brussel sprouts' category, and would love to pull some of those workloads back to Fusion if the feature and performance gaps are closed.

I'll second Technogeezer's request - we've both been through M&A before, and know it takes time to get strategy settled down, but between the reputation Broadcom has in the industry, their actions to date, and the lack of progress since the M1 came out (even before the acquisition) there's a lot of frustration built up in the community and a strong perception of 'dead man walking'.  I hate to say it, but the last release was underwhelming - the 'automated ISO' feature is nice, but the lack of shared folders, unfixed bugs and poor graphics performance were major gaps.

So a request: even if the updates won't come until a tech preview after WWDC, sharing those details on what to expect soon would be really helpful (with the appropriate make-the-lawyers-happy disclaimers)...and all the better if there's an interim 13.6 release before WWDC so there's a robust, stable version out there while you work through the usual Apple moved the cheese things until fall.

Best of luck to you and the team, and the fact that we're still here reflects both the strong community and market-leading platform that's been built over the past years.  We want Fusion to succeed - fingers crossed!