Downloading VMware Fusion and Workstation Free for Personal Use

You may have heard the exciting news about VMware Fusion and Workstation being free for personal use, but maybe you're finding the Broadcom support portal a little overwhelming... This post is for you! I'll walk through how to download the new personal use editions of VMware Fusion Pro and VMware Workstation Pro.

Summary

  1. Go to broadcom.com
  2. In the upper right corner, select 'Support Portal'
  3. Either log in by clicking 'Go To Portal' or 'Register' for a basic Broadcom account Quick link to the registration form
  4. Once logged in, go to support.broadcom.com if you're not redirected there
  5. Click the dropdown to choose the VMware Cloud Foundation division
  6. On the left, click 'My Downloads'
  7. Search for either Fusion or Workstation
  8. Click the product name (VMware Fusion or VMware Workstation Pro )
  9. Notice the dropdown for the Personal Use edition (it is the exact same binaries as the Commercial one)
  10. Select 17.5.2 or 13.5.2
  11. Download and install

Log into Broadcom.com

login.broadcom.com page

First step is to get logged in to the Support Portal. You'll need a free account in order to access downloads, so if you haven't registered you'll need to do that here

Once logged in, we have to get to the VMware Cloud Foundation Downloads...

Within Broadcom, we're a part of the VMware Cloud Foundation division. This is the same group that delivers ESXi, VMware vSphere, VMware Cloud Foundation and more. Fusion and Workstation left the End User Computing group back in 2018 and 'came home to vSphere'.

VMware Cloud Foundation is our home!

So make sure you select that so you can find our builds!

My Downloads

Now we need to click My Downloads to see the big list of everythig available... It's a lot, so we'll narrow it down using the search field

You probably dont want BitFusion...
Search for Fusion

Or search for Workstation

Or search for Workstation

Download the Personal Use Bits

After selecting either VMware Fusion or VMware Workstation in the previous panel, you should notice within the list of products there is now a 'For Personal Use' option.

Find the Personal Use folder

Agree to terms, and download!

Now we just need to download! You may need to select the 'agree to Broadcom terms and conditions'

Agree to terms, pass through the Export Control if asked

x.5.2 has the support for Free

In order to use the Pro edition for Personal Use, you need to install either Fusion Pro 13.5.2 or Workstation Pro 17.5.2 (Windows or Linux).

I'll follow up this post with another about how to convert from Player to Pro for personal use!

If you find anything innacurate or if I missed a step, please let me know on Twitter!