Broadcom yanks ESXi Free version, effective immediately

There are two kinds of datacenter admins, those who aren’t using VMWare, and those who are migrating away from VMWare.

Regrettably, there is currently no substitute product offered.
I really don't think you regret a God damn thing broadcom.
- If you're already running windows, hyper-v. theres proxmox, and tons of others. So they are mistaken. 🤣
  
  They mean that they aren't offering another solution.
  
  All of them not equate in same league. Do you know any type 1 free supervises out there? Xen probably.

RIP VMware.
Broadcom prefers to milk the top 500 customers with unreasonable fees rather than bother with the rest of the world. They know that nobody with a brain would intentionally start a new datacenter with VMware solutions
- Not anymore, thats for damn sure.
- It's really sad, they used to be amazing and the goto for running Linux VMs on back in the day. Still haven't seen anyone do hardware pass through as well.
- When big players like AWS are running KVM and XCP-NG, yeah. VMware is basically the also-ran at this point.

Well dang, I guess that "learn about proxmox" line on my to-do list just moved a little higher. For the most part, I've enjoyed using ESXi and am sad to see it go.
- FWIW, I run proxmox at home, and I friggin love it. It's really not hard at all.
  
  I like Unraid... It has a UI for VMs and LXC containers like Proxmox, but it also has a pretty good Docker UI. I've got most things running on Docker on my home server, but I've also got one VM (Windows Server 2022 for Blue Iris) and two LXC containers. (LXC support is a plugin; it doesn't come out-of-the-box)
  Docker with Proxmox is a bit weird, since it doesn't actually support Docker and you have to run Docker inside an LXC container or VM.

Along with the termination of perpetual licensing, Broadcom has also decided to discontinue the Free ESXi Hypervisor, marking it as EOGA (End of General Availability).
Wiktionary: Adjective perpetual (not comparable) Lasting forever, or for an indefinitely long time.
Hello ProxMox here I come!
- They're terminating in the sense that they won't sell it anymore. They're not breaking the licensing they've already sold (mostly, there was some fuckery with activating licensing they sold through third parties)
  
  Sort of. The activation license will work as long as you have it. They won't renew support though, which effectively kills it when the support contract runs out.
- Hello ProxMox here I come!
  Proxmox is questionable open-source, performs poorly and will most likely end up burning the free users at some point. Get get yourself into LXC/LXD/Incus that does both containers and VMs, is way more performant and clean and is also available on Debian's repositories.
  
  You know, you can recommend lxd and whatever without putting out FUD about proxmox and other tech.

Really glad I made the transition from ESXi to Docker containers about a year ago. Easier to manage too and lighter on resources. Plus upgrades are a breeze. Should have done that years ago...
- I need full on segregated machines sometimes though. I've got stuff that only runs in Win98 or XP (old radio programming software).
  
  Might be time to look into Proxmox. There's a fun weekend project for you!
  
  Do you work for a railroad? That sounds too familiar.
  
  I agree with the other poster; you should look into proxmox. I migrated from ESXi to proxmox 7-8 years ago or so, and honestly its been WAY better than ESXi. The migration process was pretty easy too, i was able to bring over the images from ESXi and load them directly into proxmox.
  
  If you're running a basic linux install you can use KVM for some VMs. Or use Proxmox for a good ESXi replacement.
  
  Fear no my friend. Get get yourself into LXC/LXD/Incus as it can do both containers and full virtual machines. It is available on Debian's repositories and is fully and truly open-source.
- So... you replaced a property solution by a free one that depends on proprietary components and a proprietary distribution mechanism? Get get yourself into LXC/LXD/Incus (that does both containers and VMs) and is available on Debian's repositories. Or Podman if you really like the mess that Docker is.
  
  I've seen you recommending this here before - what's its selling point vs say qemu-kvm? Does Incus do virtual networking without having to straight up learn iptables or whatever? (Not that there is anything wrong with iptables, I just have to choose what I can learn about)

The most important thing for everyone to remember is that if you don't fully own the thing such that you can install and run it without asking permission, or if it isn't simply free and open source, then it can go away at any time.

XCP-ng or Proxmox if you need a bare metal hypervisor. Both open source, powerful, mature, and have large communities with lots of helpful documentation.
I think you can migrate ESXi VMs directly to XCP-ng. I have moved onto it about 6 months ago and it has been solid. Steep learning curve, but really great once you get the hang of it, and enterprise grade if you need stuff like HA clustering and complex virtual networking solutions.
- I managed to migrate all mine to libvirt when I dumped esxi. They dropped support for the old opteron I was running at the time, so I couldn't upgrade to v7. Welp, Fedora Server does just as well and I've been moving the VM hosted services into containers anyway.
  Ofc... well, we'll see what IBM does with RedHat. Probably something like this eventually. They simply can't help themselves.

Oh no!
Anyway...
Been on Proxmox for a couple of years and it's been great.

Yay... Capitalism...
- This was totally expected, even before BCM bought them. This is the same thing we had with CentOS/ReadHat and that will happen with Docker/DockerHub and all the people that moved from CentOS to Ubuntu.
- Its not capitalism it just is business. No one is making you use it.

I'm shocked I tell you; simply shocked...

Sucks but not surprising. Broadcom has a history of doing things like this, ugh. Even with their paid products they jack up the price so much that the only customers that stick around are the business enterprise types that are locked in & can't easily migrate for various reasons.

Bummer. Oh well, good thing I’m learning proxmox eh.

I wonder what's the future of vmware player
- Not bright...

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

Fewer Letters	More Letters
ESXi	VMWare virtual machine hypervisor
HA	Home Assistant automation software
~	High Availability
LTS	Long Term Support software version
LXC	Linux Containers
NAS	Network-Attached Storage
Plex	Brand of media server package
RPi	Raspberry Pi brand of SBC
SBC	Single-Board Computer
ZFS	Solaris/Linux filesystem focusing on data integrity

8 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 4 acronyms.

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High Availability not Home Assistant.
- Depends which community you ask 🤣. It was definitely high availability first though.

ESXi sucks
- Have you ever used it?
  
  I don't own an IBM mainframe so.

Hopefully everyone migrated.

What about virtualizing windows?
Only thing I know of is hyperv, but it's not widely used I don't think and MS is pushing azure $tack right?
- Hyper-v is definitely wisely used...
  Lots of hypervisors support windows. Ie proxmox
  
  To be pedantic - KVM is the hypervisor. Proxmox is a wrapper to it.
- Anything based on KVM does great
  
  Just make sure you install the virtio drivers.
- I tried virtualizing Windows on proxmox and it went smooth

what does this mean for me? i have a lenovo 82k100lqus
- Doesn't mean anything right now if you are running ESXi, except you can't reinstall ESXi unless you kept the image and you won't get ESXi updates.
  
  i looked it up, and it's part of vmware? i don't run that so shrug