Broadcom-owned VMware kills the free version of ESXi virtualization software
Broadcom-owned VMware kills the free version of ESXi virtualization software
Software's free version was a good fit for tinkerers and hobbyists.
Since Broadcom's $61 billion acquisition of VMware closed in November 2023, Broadcom has been charging ahead with major changes to the company's personnel and products. In December, Broadcom began laying off thousands of employees and stopped selling perpetually licensed versions of VMware products, pushing its customers toward more stable and lucrative software subscriptions instead. In January, it ended its partner programs, potentially disrupting sales and service for many users of its products.
This week, Broadcom is making a change that is smaller in scale but possibly more relevant for home users of its products: The free version of VMware's vSphere Hypervisor, also known as ESXi, is being discontinued.
RIP VMware.
VMs in general
There are a variety of options available with near feature parity. Killing the free version effectively cut out lab users which may as well say: we sure would like people to start training on a new platform. People use what they are comfortable with.... and tend to carry a hatchet for companies that burn them.
This was a short sighted play which ultimately will result in the platform dying slowly as the workforce changes. They cut off new blood: less people will be proficient with their platform and more will be pushing for a switch to the competition. In addition to the loss of the free version they massively ramped prices. They won't last. Right now the companies that are too big to pivot are already starting to weigh the costs of transitioning vs the squeeze. The C-suite are idiots.
N.. no..
Lotta people here working in legacy not realizing you can run bare metal k8s with containers and never touch a proper vm again. That said, if you are in the cloud basically everything is a vm even when you are using k8s. Two of the big three cloud providers run on top of Xen and one uses hyper-v for all of their machine types
Proxmox my beloved
Did you ever try LXD/Incus?
Once you’ve throughly beaten your head against every little thing that’s not ready to go out of the box like ESX is, puzzled through cryptic VM errors and Ubuntu being broken on default VM settings, and then browsed the sometimes aggressively unhelpful forums, it’s great!
You are either going all in with VMware or you're dead to them. Full suite or nothing, take your pick.
Perhaps I'll try it out for a while before making such a huge commitme.. oh, i see...
For the cost, SMB is going to walk away. There are millions of SMB's.
They are planning to tolerate losing 95% of their customers. Of about 100,000 customers, they only care about 600 of them much, and about 6 thousand kind of, if they want to stick around, but not too much. The rest are fully expected to bail.
https://www.theregister.com/2022/05/30/broadcom_strategy_vmware_customer_impact/
LOL was about to implement esxi, on a rather beefy surplus server, to run all my students' PCs on since win 11 won't boot on their hardware from 24h2... Guess my students won't get to use VMware and the purchase approval I just got for a few workstation pro licenses wasn't needed.
Proxmox for baremetal hypervisor, or? I've got a bunch of windows server licenses as well, I think some for hyper-v server as well. What would you implement?
I'm happy with proxmox in a non-production environment/homeLab. Stable and straightforward.
Just found out from your comment that windows is shutting the door completely on CPUs that don't support POPCNT. There's config settings to install Windows 11 on legacy hardware (old CPU, tpm chips, etc) but who knows when they'll pull the plug on that.
Weird as it is, it's not as radical as I thought:
For Intel's chips, it was added as part of SSE4.2 in the original first-generation Core architecture, codenamed Nehalem. In AMD's processors, it's included in SSE4a, first used in Phenom, Athlon, and Sempron CPUs based on the K10 architecture. These architectures date back to 2008 and 2007, respectively.
Of course they probably could have avoided it, but a 15 year old PC is as close to ewaste as it gets. Even if you could run Linux on it, a modern smartwatch probably has more computing power, let alone a smartphone or raspberry pi. The main use could be as a space heater.
Proxmox is really good, same with XCP-ng. You could also run something like Debian server and roll your own KVM based platform if you have the chops.
Overall, lots of solid choices in the Open Source realm. I would avoid proprietary solutions, since that's largely the reason the whole VMWare situation happened in the first place.
Here's a really nice guide to XCP-NG vs Proxmox (Video creator's preference is for XCP, so there's an acknowledged bias there, but it's still a solid rundown of the two).
Personally, I just run straight KVM on Debian or Ubuntu servers, but that's not for everyone. Web based management for KVM is still kind of rough. Cockpit is getting there, but it's missing key features, and the web based graphical console absolutely sucks.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Check xcp-ng with xen-orchestra.
I really like XCP-ng. Imo the interface is more understandable and polished than Proxmox. Similar to vSphere + vCenter, but more advanced options as well.
Hyper-V or nutanix community. those will be the dominant hypervisors in the near future. I can see nutanix really taking off soon if they cant reach some of the features that VMware had. Hyper-v is sort of stuck since their host OS layer sucks, but it’s also pretty cheap.
They've "redone" hyper-v a bit with the Azure HCI stack, but yeah, the OS layer sucks. Even more so than normal windows server.
I know internally Broadcom is screwing over VMware employees with new contracts. I've heard of staff pushing back three times so far to get contracts changed.
They also poached all of the biggest customers from a bunch of their resellers, from what I hear. I'm guessing the reseller market is pretty dead.
This is exactly what happened.
Well shit. ESXi was the best way to build a home lab when studying for the professional certifications I need.
Proxmox?
Proxmox is a good option for home labs (in my opinion) but it sucks if your workplace utilizes VMWare (or a product limited to VMWare) and you want practice at home
I haven't worked with it before. The product is only supported on VMWare hypervisors, so no matter what, I'll have to build on an unsupported setup, but I was leaning towards KVM for familiarity. I will make sure to check Proxmox out too though.
Check out XCP-ng. Open source, enterprise grade bare metal hypervisor.
I moved from ESXi to it about a year ago, it's been solid. Lots of documentation and support from the community. Lawrence Systems has a ton of great videos on configuring it, both simple and advanced.
Why can't we have nice things
We do, we have Proxmox.
And LXD/Incus...
Why use Proxmox when half of it's technology (the container part) was made by the same people who made LXD/Incus? I mean Incus is free, well funded and can be installed on a clean Debian system with way less overhead and also delivers both containers and VMs.
And everyone clapp... oops not that kind of story
And everyone saw that coming
And everyone saw that coming
I wonder where all the "wE jUSt GoTTa WAiT aNd SEe" people are now?
Try Nutanix AHV community edition
Now I'll grant you bringing up/down clusters & farms can be a bit fiddly for you Windows folks, but for the Linux folks Nutanix is like discovering a new favorite food.
How is it fiddly for Windows users?
It has about a handful of extra steps, that you really need to get correct, especially if you have AHV clustered with MS clusters running on top of it.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
In December, Broadcom began laying off thousands of employees and stopped selling perpetually licensed versions of VMware products, pushing its customers toward more stable and lucrative software subscriptions instead.
This week, Broadcom is making a change that is smaller in scale but possibly more relevant for home users of its products: The free version of VMware's vSphere Hypervisor, also known as ESXi, is being discontinued.
ESXi is what is known as a "bare-metal hypervisor," lightweight software that runs directly on hardware without requiring a separate operating system layer in between.
ESXi allows you to split a PC's physical resources (CPUs and CPU cores, RAM, storage, networking components, and so on) among multiple virtual machines.
ESXi also supports passthrough for PCI, SATA, and USB accessories, allowing guest operating systems direct access to components like graphics cards and hard drives.
It was also a useful tool for people who used the enterprise versions of the vSphere Hypervisor but wanted to test the software or learn its ins and outs without dealing with paid licensing.
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