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
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.