The session recordings for VMware Explore 2024 are available for free for everyone to watch.

www.vmware.com/explore/video-library/search

In May 2024 VMware by Broadcom announced that their personal virtualization software is now available for free for personal use. This is for VMware Workstation and VMware Fusion.

VMware Workstation Pro: Now Available Free for Personal Use

Because these are now available for free the previous free to use software Player for both Windows and MacOS is now no longer available. 

One of my students asked if it is possible to also login to the vCenter server appliance management interface (VAMI) with an Active Directory account. The VAMI is available on your vCenter server on port 5480. After installation of the vCenter Appliance you can login with root and with administrator@vsphere.local (or a different SSO-domain name if you have entered something else than  vsphere.local).

When using the vSphere Client it is only possible to export a virtual machine as a template in OVF-format. Exporting in OVA-format is not supported at the moment. This functionality has been removed since vSphere 6.5 (documentation).

It is however possible to export a virtual machine in the OVA-format with the VMware OVFtool via the command line. 

In February 2024, shortly after the acquisition for VMware by Broadcom, VMware has removed their free hypervisor ESXi from their website. 

End Of General Availability of the Free vSphere Hypervisor (ESXi 7.x and 8.x) (2107518)

VMware has published this bog-post that clarifies what will happen with products that where previously available with a separate license. Some products are now available as part as VMware Cloud Foundation, vSphere Foundation or an add-on service. Other products will no longer be available. Here's the link to the blog explaining about all of this:

VMware End Of Availability of Perpetual Licensing and SaaS Services

In October 2023 the VMware Flings website became unavailable. That was a bummer for all VMware enthusiasts that where using the tools and utilities from that platform to make their lives easier and improve their management capabilities for their VMware environment.