Enlarge (credit: VMware)

Since Broadcom's $61 billion acquisition of VMware closed in November 2023, Broadcom has been charging ahead with major changes to the company's personnel and products. In December, Broadcom began laying off thousands of employees and stopped selling perpetually licensed versions of VMware products , pushing its customers toward more stable and lucrative software subscriptions instead. In January, it ended its partner programs , potentially disrupting sales and service for many users of its products.

This week, Broadcom is making a change that is smaller in scale but possibly more relevant for home users of its products: The free version of VMware's vSphere Hypervisor, also known as ESXi, is being discontinued .

ESXi is what is known as a "bare-metal hypervisor," lightweight software that runs directly on hardware without requiring a separate operating system layer in between. ESXi allows you to split a PC's physical resources (CPUs and CPU cores, RAM, storage, networking components, and so on) among multiple virtual machines. ESXi also supports passthrough for PCI, SATA, and USB accessories, allowing guest operating systems direct access to components like graphics cards and hard drives.

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VMware's new owner is ending the virtualization and cloud computing company's partner programs. It's unclear who or how many current partners will be able to sell VMware-related offerings after April 2024, leaving potential for tens of thousands of businesses to be disrupted.

Broadcom, which closed its VMware acquisition in November, told The Register in late December that “effective February 5, 2024, Broadcom will be transitioning VMware’s partner programs to the invitation-only Broadcom Advantage Partner Program.” This signaled the end of VMware's partnerships with solution providers, resellers, and distributors. But today’s news reportedly reveals a final closure date for the cloud services provider partner program, which debuted in 2019.

Today, The Register reported that Broadcom recently shared an end-of-partnership date specifically for VMware cloud service provider partners, which work with VMware through the VMware Partner Connect Program that launched in 2020.

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Broadcom has moved forward with plans to transition VMware , a virtualization and cloud computing company, into a subscription-based business. As of December 11, it no longer sells perpetual licenses with VMware products. VMware, whose $61 billion acquisition by Broadcom closed in November, also announced on Monday that it will no longer sell support and subscription (SnS) for VMware products with perpetual licenses. Moving forward, VMware will only offer term licenses or subscriptions, according to its VMware blog post .

VMware customers with perpetual licenses and active support contracts can continue using them. VMware "will continue to provide support as defined in contractual commitments," Krish Prasad, senior vice president and general manager for VMware's Cloud Foundation Division, wrote. But when customers' SnS terms end, they won't have any support.

Broadcom hopes this will force customers into subscriptions, and it's offering "upgrade pricing incentives" that weren't detailed in the blog for customers who switch from perpetual licensing to a subscription.

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Broadcom announced back in May of 2022 that it would buy VMware for $61 billion and take on an additional $8 billion of the company's debt, and on November 22 of 2023 Broadcom said that it had completed the acquisition . And it looks like Broadcom's first big move is going to be layoffs: according to WARN notices filed with multiple states (catalogued here by Channel Futures), Broadcom will be laying off at least 2,837 employees across multiple states, including 1,267 at its Palo Alto campus in California.

As Channel Futures notes, the actual number of layoffs could be higher, since not all layoffs require WARN notices. We've contacted Broadcom for more information about the total number of layoffs and the kinds of positions that are being affected and will update if we receive a response. VMware has around 38,300 employees worldwide.

The WARN notices list the reason for the layoffs as "economic," but provide no further explanation or justification.

Enlarge / You can now use Touch ID to log in to your Windows virtual machine. (credit: Parallels )

It's an annual tradition to see an update to Mac virtualization software Parallels Desktop a few weeks before the next major macOS release. Like clockwork, we've come to that time again: Parallels Desktop 19 is available now, with a handful of improvements for users who want to run Windows or Linux on their Macs.

It's not the most radical year-over-year update we've seen, but there are some welcome optimizations and tweaks. The headlining feature is the ability to use Touch ID to sign in to your Windows virtual machine. When you next launch your Windows VM, your Windows password can be saved to your Mac's keychain with a Touch ID-specific record that is unique to your device. It's important to note that this is just for signing into the VM, though; this is not full Touch ID support for all the places Windows Hello appears throughout Microsoft's operating system.

There are also various tweaks to make Parallels macOS Sonoma-ready, what with Apple's annual OS update coming sometime this fall. For example, a change in Sonoma would have broken the Shared Printing feature that allows you to print from your Windows VM. Parallels' engineers re-configured the feature to get it working within the new release and made some improvements to it.

Enlarge / The latest Microsoft Store version of the Windows Subsystem for Linux allows for graphical apps, systemd support, multiple distributions, and a lot of questions about whether you have three different options enabled on your Windows 10 system. (credit: Kevin Purdy)

The Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), one of the best reasons to run Windows 11 , is now also available to Windows 10 users. WSL dropped its "preview" label with a 1.0 release , offering its best features to Windows 10 users.

Getting the best version of WSL used to mean installing big, system-level Windows updates (including 11 itself). As part of its broader moving of key apps into its Store, Microsoft now offers the most feature-rich version of WSL. "The in-Windows version of WSL will still receive critical bug fixes, but the Store version of WSL is where new features and functionality will be added," Windows Developer Platform Program Manager Craig Loewen noted in a blog post .

Loewen noted that the "WSL community's requests" drove Microsoft to make the latest, GUI-ready framework version available to Windows 10 users. Now a Store installation is the default, even if you the command line (PowerShell) to install and update WSL. Now anyone whose system is capable of running WSL has access to graphical apps and (optional) systemd support , and can hopefully spend less time wondering which WSL version they have, what they need, and what the differences are.

Enlarge / Unsurprisingly, getting a standard amd64-based Linux image installed as a virtual machine on an ARM-based Mac results in sadness. (credit: Kevin Purdy)

Nearly four years after its last major release, VirtualBox 7.0 arrives with a… host of new features. Chief among them are Windows 11 support via TPM, EFI Secure Boot support, full encryption for virtual machines, and a few Linux niceties.

The big news is support for Secure Boot and TPM 1.2 and 2.0, which makes it easier to install Windows 11 without registry hacks (the kind Oracle recommended for 6.1 users ). It's strange to think about people unable to satisfy Windows 11's security requirements on their physical hardware, but doing so with a couple clicks in VirtualBox, but here we are.

TPM and Secure Boot options in VirtualBox 7.0 make it easier to install Windows 11 guests. (credit: Kevin Purdy)

VirtualBox 7.0 also allows virtual machines to run with full encryption, not just inside the guest OS—but logs, saved states, and other files connected to the VM. At the moment, this support only works through the command line, "for now," Oracle notes in the changelog .

Enlarge (credit: Marco Rosario Venturini Autieri/Getty Images)

For decades, virtualization software has offered a way to vastly multiply computers’ efficiency, hosting entire collections of computers as “virtual machines” on just one physical machine. And for almost as long, security researchers have warned about the potential dark side of that technology: theoretical “hyperjacking” and “Blue Pill” attacks, where hackers hijack virtualization to spy on and manipulate virtual machines, with potentially no way for a targeted computer to detect the intrusion. That insidious spying has finally jumped from research papers to reality with warnings that one mysterious team of hackers has carried out a spree of “hyperjacking” attacks in the wild.

Today, Google-owned security firm Mandiant and virtualization firm VMware jointly published warnings that a sophisticated hacker group has been installing backdoors in VMware’s virtualization software on multiple targets’ networks as part of an apparent espionage campaign. By planting their own code in victims’ so-called hypervisors—VMware software that runs on a physical computer to manage all the virtual machines it hosts—the hackers were able to invisibly watch and run commands on the computers those hypervisors oversee. And because the malicious code targets the hypervisor on the physical machine rather than the victim’s virtual machines, the hackers’ trick multiplies their access and evades nearly all traditional security measures designed to monitor those target machines for signs of foul play.

Enlarge / A marketing splash image for Parallels Desktop 18, from the company's YouTube video about the release. (credit: Parallels )

Mac-based virtualization software Parallels launched a new version today. As with most updates to the suite, Parallels Desktop 18 adds support for new Apple hardware features, improves Windows virtualization, and expands compatibility.

The two headlining features of Parallels Desktop 18 are ProMotion support and several new features and optimizations for playing Windows games on Macs.

The first feature is pretty straightforward: Parallels now fully supports automatic refresh rate changes up to 120 Hz, matching the ProMotion feature in the M1-based 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro .