It’s normally £150 or whatever, some bloke is selling licenses on eBay for £20. He says they come with no support entitlement which is why they’re cheap.

Dodgy, or not?

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/VMware-Workstation-12-Pro-64-bit-Lifetime-Activation-Code-/181947337136?hash=item2a5ce809b0:g:epUAAOSwDNdV6yLW

I’ve just bought one as it seems a bargain and I am willing to take a punt.

Will not be able to do anything with it for a while though as I am in far off Budapest for the next week.

You can physically install and download on as many machines as you want. The licence does not allow this though and it is likely an enterprise licence that he is breaking the terms of, or a single user licence for multiple machines.

You cannot register as the serial number will be linked to his support account. When VMWare notice that he suddenly has 200 installs all over the world, it will likely block the serial number and suspend his account. You won’t be able to get updates, but it will likely keep working. You won’t be able get the reduced upgrade.

So yes dodgy, but will likely provide a working environment. If you genuinely need VMWare Pro, you can probably justify the license cost.

If it looks dodgy, it probably is. If someone was selling Santa Cruz bikes for £100 each, would you buy them? It’s exactly the same thing.

If you want to run virtual machines, try https://www.virtualbox.org/ as it will be just as good for 90% of needs. And you won’t be stealing anything.

Rachel

VirtualBox +1

In fact I’ve just powered off a Virtual Box Synology (well xpenology) machine on my Win7 box.

Or VMware Player.

Or, y’know, use ESXi, like a real boy. (-:

it is likely an enterprise licence that he is breaking the terms of, or a single user licence for multiple machines

That’s what I thought.

Player – yeah, I guess you can probably do most things I need with player.

Virtualbox wasn’t quite as nice in terms of hardware performance, which meant the graphical effects and so on weren’t so swish, and I’m shallow like that.

I am rather tempted by ESXi for my laptop, but the thing that slightly concerns me is battery life. Using VMs seems to drain battery, so if I use ESXi and everything’s a VM, then I’m going to lose battery life.

Had 3 Virtualbox VMs running for work today, all managed via vagrant. Two Linux and one Windows server running SQL Server. All perfectly happy on my MacBook.

Rachel

ATG not saying Virtualbox doesn’t work, I’m saynig the graphical effects aren’t as nice (or weren’t when I tried it).

Okay – well pay for what does provide the effects you want then. Just don’t steal it.

Rachel.

Hence the post.

If you’ve got a Pro, Enterprise or Education edition of Windows from 8.1 onwards or Server edition, Hyper-V is built in and “free” (well, inclusive).

Dodgier than a dodgy thing on national dodgy day

Pricing up VMware is my job for one of, if not the biggest UK distributors of VMware. If we could buy it for 5 times that, I’d have his arm off.

Yeah we use VirtualBox extensively at work, having moved away from VMWare.

I like it a lot. Can’t say I notice any lack of graphical effects mol.
Win7 in the VM behaves identically to Win7 on my desktop.

Other OS may vary I guess (I use xUbuntu, CentOS and LynxOS VMs too but I’ve not used them on a native desktop to compare)

I’ve used vmplayer to play the vms and qemu to create the VMS before. I actually used qemu to play the VM as well in Linux.

Strikes me as a pirated key but meh

Probably sell’s Linux Red Hat disks too. (it’s open source software)

As someone who sells software for a living looks very dodgy.