Are we just ignoring the potential death of workstation

[aloshka]

The entire workstation team is gone and they are moving things to China, without a knowledge transfer. I'm going to go with death of workstation or at the very best maintenance mode.

I love workstation and I loved the developers that worked for the UI team. This blows.

Are there similar alternatives except for server-based stuff like esx, hyper v (i know not server, but doesn't have a real console)?

[BobAgi]

Are you saying that VMWare is moving its operations from USA?

Do you have any link to a page that describes this?

I'm getting worried too....

[wila · Accepted solution]

Hello,

I'm not sure that this is the death of Workstation.

It certainly isn't a good thing for the product that I fully agree with and I also think it was a very strange choice of management to lay off the Fusion and Workstation teams.

Realize though that Workstation is built from many parts, eg. the hypervisor in the product is the same as vSphere's one.

There are of course plenty of areas that are not sharing code which are specific for desktop virtualisation (think Unity as another example, but there's a lot more where that came from)

They did leave some developers in groups working with the Workstation/Fusion teams that have intimate knowledge of parts and from several parts out of VMware it has been stated that the product isn't dead. For example a tweet from yesterday: VMware Workstation on Twitter: "Our commitment to deliver leading virtualization on Windows and Linu...

The topic has also been open in a few threads in the Fusion forum, see Future of Fusion after team layoff? to start with.

If you want to read a summary then have a look at a blog post that I will keep up to date as more info comes: The future of VMware Fusion and VMware Workstation - PlanetVM

--

Wil

[BobAgi]

Thanks for the info!

I am a long time WorkStation user first during my professional developer days and also now that I am retired I am still using it for my private coding work.

And my daughter worked as a development lead on Fusion/Workstation up until about 5-6 years ago, when she moved with her husband to his home state to start up a family. When she was working at VMWare I visited the premises and was amazed at the nice developer environment they had.

So I am kind of interested in the company as such and surprised about this move.

It makes me sad to hear about these lay-offs.

[aloshka]

Thanks for the links, I didn't even think about going to the Fusion forums. I kind of scrolled through the first 9 pages of threads here and didn't find anything. It just was very disappointing hearing about it all. And some of the developers are starting to post some stuff on reddit and I guess it just freaked me out because I use workstation so much–I'm a consultant that has many clients and each client has their own VM. Works out really well, perfect separation.

I'm also in the midst of upgrading my PC and thought about Mac with Parallels if Workstation/Fusion is destined to die. I'm assuming with the layoffs we are not going to see any updates anytime soon either, so bad timing for me.

[continuum]

> It certainly isn't a good thing for the product that I fully agree with and I also think it was a very strange choice of management to lay off the Fusion and Workstation teams.

In the history of Workstation several very strange choices have been made - later attempts to revert those decisions had poor results.

- biggest mistake IMHO was made at launch of WS 5.
GSX 3 - the best workstation ever - was discontinued and replaced by a VMserver. VMserver was released as freeware - but was crippled so that it was not really attractive.
VMplayer was introduced - which actually was just a crippled Workstation.
Later when management realised that the remote functions of GSX were missing in Workstation they were re-introduced but never reached the maturity of the remote functions of GSX.
At that time it would have been much smarter to continue GSX as the paid Workstation Pro version and to release a slightly crippled Workstation as freeware.

- WS 6.5 and 7 had something called ACE-features - they allowed encryption and policies and the implementation was very mature.
At launch of WS 8 this functionality was completely removed without any obvious reasons.
A few versions later it was noticed that encryption was something the users asked for and so some former ACE-features were re-implemented but again those functions never reached the mature state they already had reached years before.

- Most recent mistake of WS product management IMHO was not to try closer integration with the vSphere-productline.
But product-managers that are no longterm WS power-users probably were not able to realise how little effort it would require to make vSphere and WS 100% compatible.
If vSphere-users for example could use WS to create patches for ESXi VMs and distribute the results in form of redologs (snapshots) then headquarters could regard it as useful to keep the product alive.
Its ridiculous that VMware rather separates ESXi and WS by another product - Converter - instead of allowing a free flow of VMs across platforms.
I expect to see WS share the same fate as VMserver: die quietly in a corner

Ulli

[Woodmeister50]

Announcements of elimination of a development staff for a product almost always spells

death of a product.  It usually makes current users unsettled about the product future

(regardless of corporate doublespeak about commitment) start considering and moving

to alternatives.  It also makes perspective newcomers also reconsider coming to a product

who's development team has been canned.  As a result, this will reduce demand for the product

and reducing income.

Redistributing new resources to a product's development immediately impacts future development

and current product upkeep as there is a learning curve for the new folks.  This results in at a minimum

a stagnated development cycle for some period of time as well as less than "stellar" products (again due to

the non-familiarity of of new personnel to the product as well as the customer base.

Combining the above effects, there will most likely be a downward spiral of the product that may or

may not be able to be recovered from.  Perhaps that is what corporate wants to create the excuse

to bring an end to the product line.

They're off to a good start.

[_Royce_]

I can't believe this. I've been away on extended holidays and come back to this.

I was just yesterday saying to a colleague that now that everything is working so well on Workstation, I wonder how long it will be supported by VMware. So I now know that i have one year to replace it all after just recently going live.

And VirtualBox isn't a solution given that NT just didn't work properly with it.

Given that the OS I'm running is so old, is there any harm continuing to use Workstation post EOL given that everything is working fine? I would probably need to stop updating the host OS to limit the possibility of introducing new issues. But that doesn't really concern me.

[dfloyd888]

Same here.  VMWare Workstation is my #1 defense against compromise when browsing the Web, just because if the client VM gets compromised due to a browser or browser add-on hole, damage is contained and it just takes a rollback to a previous saved snapshot to fix it.  It may not be VMWare's core business tool, but for people like me, it is something quite important and useful... a must have utility for security, arguably more important than antivirus software.