[nilsbunger]

I'm a bit annoyed, I just paid $50 to upgrade to the Lion version last year, plus $50 for Fusion 3 upgrade the year before that, and now I have to pay again?

My single Fusion license has cost me $150 over the last 3 years! Thanks a lot VMware!

[microtonal]

Not only that, but the upgrade price is virtually the same as the full price. Euro 43.07 vs. Euro 44.99. It must be some sick joke.

On the upside, it's good news that operating systems are cheaper than VMWare Fusion these days ;).

[slantyyz]

It looks like the $50 upgrade takes you to the otherwise $99 professional version. I can't seem to find an upgrade link to the standard version.

[s_henry_paulson]

If you're hung up on the money, VirtualBox should do what you need, it has a seamless mode, and it's free.

[carlesfe]

Talking from experience, VirtualBox doesn't play well with Steam games (or games in general).

For me, Terraria was buggy and the graphics had some glitches. Half-Life had mouse issues, etc.

I used to buy Parallels but they use the same update tactics than VMWare, so now I just don't use Windows games at all.

[lflux]

You're in for a surprise if you ever look at their server products. In my environment the VMware licenses cost more than the hardware they run on.

[pinko]

I've said this before, but my experience with VMWare is that they do a very good job estimating the TCO of N physical servers and then they charge you such that it's ~90% of that cost to virtualize them. I.e., VMWare is usually a better deal, but just barely. Drives me insane.

[nilsbunger]

Yeah I know, I previously founded a company doing desktop virtualization on VMware ESX. I know it runs up to $3-5K per server, and that often turns out to be the "cheap" part after you're done with the SAN vendors :)

Even the fortune 500 are complaining about VMware prices though, but they keep paying because their whole datacenters are based on it. Hopefully Hyper-V will at some point provide some counter-weight to keep VMware's pricing in check.

[epo]

Parallels pull pretty much the same trick and will on Sep 4th when Parallels 8 comes out. For me P7 works for Linux and Mountain Lion, doubt I will upgrade.

[moepstar]

's just the same with Parallels... I've bought v6 which isn't compatible with Mountain Lion now (worked with Lion just fine)

Faced with the decision to shell out 50€ to make it run with a 16€ OS upgrade after a little thinking, googling etc. i just went with Bootcamp & Windows 7.

While this doesn't have the convenience of just starting the VM (gotta reboot) it at least has native performance which in my use-case (3D CAD) is more desirable anyways.

And you can't beat the feeling of not being extorted anymore...

[krobertson]

I just bought Fusion 4 two months ago. Was using Fusion 3 for a long time just fine... got a new retina mac and had a few issues with it, so got 4 and it mostly fixed them and I was content.

Now 5 comes out, seemingly has better retina support, and I'd have to shell out $50 again. No thanks.

Each Fusion release is less and less compelling for the most part. Fusion 4 was "built for Lion", yet I used Fusion 3 on Lion exclusively until June just fine.

[evilduck]

My Fusion4 install still works fine on Mountain Lion. Unless one of the new features is sufficiently compelling for you, I don't see why you have to upgrade.

[StacyC]

Agree. Fusion 4 with Windows 7 runs really well for me under Mountain Lion.

[yehanyin]

You're not alone. I feel bad about the release. It's ok that VMware release 5. But the problem is when you have version 4.1 , why you directly release 5 instead of 4.2? The Fusion 3 is release after Fusion 2.0.6 and I paid the upgrade fee. And then Fusion 4 is out after Fusion 3.1 and I paid the upgrade fee too. Thanks a lot VMware!

BTW, it only costs $29 to upgrade to Lion and $19 to upgrade to Mountain Lion.

[xutopia]

I don't understand why more people don't use Virtualbox. It's free and pretty much equivalent.

[kalininalex]

I'd speculate that's because at the end of the day, for the many people on this board $50 is probably an inconsequential amount given the benefit provided (time saving, ease of use, etc) and the expense profile. After all, someone above just mentioned upgrading Fusion after purchasing MB Retina. That's what, $3k right there? Look at $50 as part of an upgrade.

On the other hand, if some people _just_ bought Fusion 4 it indeed is very annoying to pay $50 again for Fusion 5. VMware should have a free upgrade program for recent purchases of 4.

Personally, after using Fusion for 4 years I switched to Parallels. With Fusion, even when Windows is idle Fusion would use up to 20% CPU (on a 4-core), sometimes triggering fans. Parallels seems less CPU hungry and runs a bit faster (though this is subjective, try it first). It also has interesting features, such as, suspending of Bootcamp installations and the ability to use all attached displays when in full screen mode. I don't think Fusion 4 supported any of those; not sure about 5. And Parallels has a $29 license right now for those switching from VMware, so it was a good deal as well.

[roop]

_VMware should have a free upgrade program for recent purchases of 4._

They do. http://www.vmware.com/support/product-support/fusion/faq/lic...

[cstuder]

I bought Fusion because of one feature: The ability to boot my Bootcamp partition into a virtual machine. (For heavy Visual Studio useage [and gaming] I dualboot into Bootcamp, for lighter Windows use I launch the virtualized machine without shutting down Mac OS X. Two levels of performance, one installation.)

[justin66]

I found it to be buggy. In fact, Virtualbox for me had the effect of being an advertisement for VMWare.

I would love, love, love to have a free and open source option here but it's not like a web browser or something where I can live with the occasional crash or glitch.

[elechi]

It's annoying to me to use Virtualbox for OSs other than Linux or BSD based ones. It's even more buggy, and you're limited in the amount of processors and memory you can use in the free version.

[batista]

>I'm a bit annoyed, I just paid $50 to upgrade to the Lion version last year, plus $50 for Fusion 3 upgrade the year before that, and now I have to pay again?

The changing digits at the end of the names you mention (Fusion 3, 4, 5) make it sound like those are _different_ versions of the product.

Did any of them came advertising "free upgrades for life"?

If not, I don't see the point of this rant. The worked hard, implemented lots of features and put out a new version. Nobody is forced to buy, in fact the old version should still work fine.

[eli]

Nobody is forced to buy, in fact the old version should still work fine.

No, it doesn't. That's the problem. Fusion 3 is buggy on Lion and doesn't run at all on Mountain Lion [1].

Though there is some truth to your point. I'm guessing it is a non-trivial amount of work to support new OS releases. Perhaps it's even more work than the new features being added. Surely they shouldn't be obligated to support old releases forever. But a discount to existing customers sure would make me less likely to explore cheaper alternatives...

[1] http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?langua...

[andyjohnson0]

Its the same with VMware Workstation on Windows. Every time a new version of Windows is released it seems to require a new version of workstation to run it as a guest.

[dripton]

It's true on Linux as well. I upgraded my work machine from Ubuntu 11.04 to Ubuntu 12.04, and my VMWare Workstation 7 stopped working. (The kernel modules it uses are incompatible with newer kernels.) There are some third-party patches that are alleged to make it work, but I couldn't get them working quickly, so I just downloaded the version 8 beta instead. When that expires in October, I either have to pay for version 8 or retry hacking version 7.

[nilsbunger]

That is annoying. But the problem is worse on Mac OS, b/c OS X release cycle is only 12 months now.

[batista]

FWIW, I'm on the same boat: I bought 3, then 4, and now have to update to 5. They do have some discount (free upgrade actually) to those that bought it after some date however.

[nilsbunger]

I hear what you're saying, and I'm usually on your side of these debates.

But it's hard to use the existing version:

* they stop doing updates (bug fixes, security fixes, etc) on the existing version when they release a new one. And being a complex product, there are a lot of bugs to fix :)

* the existing versions don't work well with new OS X releases - Fusion reaches pretty deep into the OS, as I'm sure you know. I had to upgrade to Fusion 4 to make Lion work. Not sure yet about 4 on M.L.

The problem is Fusion is not really a mature product. It's a hard piece of SW to write, so the lack of maturity isn't really a problem by itself. It's just that they've effectively put me on a $50/yr SaaS plan without me realizing it.