Due to Meltdown or Spectre or whatever, I want to update VMware Player. However, clicking on “Software Updates” takes me to a page that advertises VMware Workstation Pro.
Is VMware Player no longer a thing? Is there no update path? It has never cost me any money before; will I have to spend money now? Should I switch to a different program? (This means I will have to set up all my VMs from scratch again.)
Has VMware even been updated to mitigate the problem issues yet?
Crap.
Workstation Player, still free for non-commercial use.
https://www.vmware.com/products/workstation-player/workstation-player-evaluation.html
v14 not affected/or has been patched for mitigation of Meltdown or Spectre, presuming underlying Host OS is patched. Patch you guest OS as well to mitigate in-guest exploit.
In terms of the wider question of VMware response to this, yes, various patches released December 2017 address the exploits and further information is developing as OS Vendors and Chip vendors release their updates.
Two primary sources of info are 0002 and 0004:
https://www.vmware.com/us/security/advisories/VMSA-2018-0002.html
https://www.vmware.com/us/security/advisories/VMSA-2018-0004.html
Has anyone here had experience with migrating a VM between different versions of VMware? Is it possible?
Yep should work fine. No migration, really, just open the VM in the new version of Workstation Player, or ESX or whatever and it will work. There could be some upgrades you could perform to upgrade the hardware level of the VM via the Workstation Player interface, which may be required to enable new features, but there is backwards compatibility of the VMDK’s themselves.
Okay I will try that. I hope the “backwards compatibility” is complete and does not disable or reverse the Meltdown and Spectre mitigations.
[edit]
Does VMware provide downloads for old versions of the program? E.g. in case I need to go back.
It’s backwards compatible in that newer versions of Player/Workstation will happily open and run VM’s created with older products. But nothing will prevent you from having to mitigate Spectre and Meltdown in-guest by applying in-guest patches! ;)
New/patched versions of Workstation/Player will mitigate any exploit related to the hypervisor function itself, though to be fair with that is still going to be somewhat reliant on your host OS being patched as well.