Take 5 with Tom Fenton: 5 Things You Can Do with VMware's Free Workstation Desktop Hypervisor
Virtualization & Cloud Review, Wednesday, April 9th, 2025
Early this year, VMware announced that Workstation was free for personal use. I was very excited about it and I wrote a few articles about it. Then, this week, VMware doubled down with this announcement and made it free for commercial use as well
I recently had a chance to do a presentation at my local VMware User Group (VMUG). The obvious choice would be to do something on the VMware Cloud Platform - Private Cloud Foundation, or perhaps VMware Tanzu, its application platform. But I chose to go old school and do a session about the five fascinating things you can do on VMware's firstborn: Workstation.
Yup, Workstation is VMware's oldest product. It was first introduced in 1999 as VMware 1.0 but its name was transmogrified in 2003 when it became Workstation 3.0.