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Announcing: VMware Workstation 16 and Fusion 12

It is our pleasure and privilege to announce the upcoming VMware Desktop Hypervisor product lines for 2020: VMware VMware Workstation 16 and VMware Fusion 12

Looking for a more Mac-centric perspective? Check out the Fusion 12 blog!

Quick Overview

Building on over 20 years of local virtualization excellence, the latest releases of our favorite virtualization tools deliver some amazing new capabilities for IT Admins, for Developers, and for everyone else.

Top of the list is bringing Kubernetes and Containers to Workstation for Windows with the CLI ‘vctl’

Developers with Fusion can already use ‘vctl’ to build, run, push or pull containers, and now we’re bringing vctl to Workstation for Windows.

vctl can now also deploy custom Kubernetes clusters with newly added support for ‘kind’ – a tool for creating developer-defined local clusters using containers as “nodes.”

The aim is to provide developers a reliable setup for establishing a rapid ‘inner loop’ pipeline of development and code iteration to build modern applications, or even when working on the codebase of Kubernetes itself.

Fusion 12 and Workstation 16 will be shipping in VMware’s Fiscal Q3 which ends in October. Don’t want to wait? We’re still collecting feedback from our Fusion and Workstation Tech Previews!

New Pricing for Workstation Pro, Fusion Pro

Workstation Pro has undergone some changes as well. Firstly, the upgrade and new license pricing are now $99 for existing customers, or $199 for new customers. For individual customers, are also now licensing Workstation for use on up to 3 personal devices. And now, those devices can now also be a Mac by simply applying your Workstation Pro license key in Fusion Pro.

Workstation Player continues to be available as Free for Personal Use, and offers commercial licenses at $149 for new licenses and $79 for upgrades, while also now providing license portability with Fusion Player. These changes should make it easy for organizations to license many workstations without necessarily knowing if their users will choose Macs or PCs beforehand.

Technology Guarantee Program

Customers who buy VMware Workstation 15.5 Pro or Workstation 15.5 Player from August 15th until Workstation 16 ships will also be automatically provided a version 16 key in their MyVMware portal.

New Features

Okay, it’s time to look a little more closely at some more new features.

Containers and Kubernetes

For developers, we’ve added support for Containers and Kubernetes with a new CLI tool: vctl!

Currently available in Fusion, vctl allows users to push, pull, build and run OCI container images, and now also includes the ability to deploy kind Kubernetes clusters.

In support of kind, vctl creates a ‘docker compatible’ socket for kind to connect to without modification, by using an implementation of containerd. We’re looking forward to working closely with the open source community to help support more tools and workflows as we continue to grow in this space!

Even better news is that it will ship with Workstation Player as well as Workstation Pro, making it accessible to everyone.

DirectX 11 and OpenGL 4.1

Workstation 16 will support running games and apps with Direct3D version 11, otherwise known as ‘DirectX 11’, or OpenGL 4.1. Users can now allocate up to 8GB of vRAM to your 3D accelerated guest to maximize gaming and 3D app performance. (vms must be configured for 16GB of RAM or more to unlock the 8GB vRAM option.)

vSphere 7 Compatibility

Workstation has been updated to support connections to vSphere 7 through ESXi and vCenter for remote VM operation and configuration, as well as providing workload mobility and compatibility between the Desktops and Data Center virtual infrastructure. (Pro products are required for remote-connections)

Dark Mode UI

Upon launching Workstation 16 for Windows, the first thing users might notice is that we’ve added an all new Dark Mode feature to the Workstation Pro and Player UIs. This striking new look feels right at home on the latest versions of Windows 10, including the recently released 2004 build. (We’re holding out on screenshots while we put the final touches on the new UI 😉

Sandboxed Graphics Rendering Engine

Workstation offers a new security enhancement feature: Sandbox Renderer. The SBR runs the virtual graphics engine in a separate thread with reduced privilege, making Fusion and Workstation more secure out-of-the-box without sacrificing performance or quality.

Linux Host: Vulkan Graphics Rendering Engine

With Workstation 16 for Linux, we’ve added a new rendering engine that takes advantage of the Vulkan API. Our new Vulkan renderer can deliver DirectX 10.1 and OpenGL 3.3 to vms even when using an integrated Intel GPU.

Improved Accessibility

We believe in making computing as inclusive as possible for everyone. To that end, we’ve improved our compliance with VPAT Section 508 to help users of all kinds get the full benefits of using virtual machines.

USB 3.1 Support + Performance & Bugfixes

In this release we’ve also added support for USB 3.1 virtual devices, allowing for USB 3.1 hardware devices to be passed into virtual machines with full driver support.

Can’t wait to ship!

Delivering Fusion and Workstation is the result of a collaboration between many different teams across all of VMware, so we want to give thanks not only to our rockstar engineers, but to all the customers and Tech Preview users who have given us such great feedback in contribution to this incredible release. We look forward to hearing your experiences in our community!

If you want to have an early look at some of these features, we’re still collecting feedback from our Fusion and Workstation Tech Previews!