Upgrade path from Workstation Pro?

[BrooklineTom]

It appears that VMWare is ending support for WorkstationPro 16 at the end of this year.

The VMWare site is so full of marketing buzzwords and meaningless (to me) balloons that I have hopes that actual humans can point me in the right direction.

I have several machines with Rocky Linux installed on the iron, and I have several AWS EC2 instances running Rocky Linux.

I want to run VMWare pro on my local iron (and hopefully on the EC2 instances) and use it to create and run guest VMs that, at a minimum, run Windows 10 Pro in each guest VM.

I'm reluctant to spend $200 on a product (Workstation Pro) that will be obsolete in less than six months.

Is VMWare replacing Workstation Pro with its equivalent? If so, can someone point me towards the product I should be investigating?

I appreciate your attention.

[ajgringo619]

The product version is not being sunsetted, only the paid support is. From what I can gather, the 15-month support window is consistent with previous versions of Workstation Pro.

According to this site - https://lifecycle.vmware.com/#/ - the End of Technical Guidance date has not been set yet, so I doubt another product will be replacing it any time soon.

[BrooklineTom]

Ah. I was contemplating per-incident support anyway.

Are you aware of competent third-party alternatives after the sunset? I'm technical and can do a fair amount myself, but I doubt that I'll ever be competent to address internal issues in the hypervisor.

[ajgringo619]

No. My main sources are paid support and these forums.

[wila]

Hi,

There's a new version of VMware Workstation every year ... (there is a reason we are at version 16 )

Pretty sure a new version will be released later this year.
As for "I don't want to spent xxx on a license when a new version is released after x months". Normally there is a few months grace period where you'll get a free update to the new version.
After that you need to buy the upgrade to get the new version.

Nowadays however there is another way to ensure your investment and that is by buying support along with your initial purchase instead of the default included 30 days complimentary support.
That will give you free upgrades to major versions during the support window. Eg. choose Basic Support and you can get a 3 year period for about $310 (or $241 for 1 year)

Sadly the page where you can buy is very unclear about what basic support actually means, here's a better explanation from the product manager @Mikero for VMware Fusion (I'm sure that it is the same for VMware Workstation, Mike is actually also the PM for Workstation)

edit: Oops, forgot to include the link: https://communities.vmware.com/t5/VMware-Fusion-Discussions/Fusion-12-Pro-Question-about-the-purchas...

Hope this helps,

--
Wil