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.

      • ɐɥOEnglish
        22•9 months ago

        Nope. I’m pretty happy with proxmox and I dont want to change a perfectly fine, running system

        • methodicalaspectEnglish
          9•9 months ago

          +1 … been using PVE in my homelab for ages and just deployed a small, self-contained (i.e. non-SAN-connected) PVE cluster at the office in light of Broadcom’s shenanigans. I had no idea just how fantastically well Proxmox ran on higher-end hardware with Ceph installed. It’s glorious.

            • @[email protected]English
              12•9 months ago

              Proxmox doesn’t have a free tier, it is free.

              You can pay for support and shit if you want.

              Since you are apparently on an anti-proxmox crusade. Have you tried that iscus thing in enterprise? Like a very large scale production deployment? Since I have never heard of it, I am curious if anyone dares to use it in enterprise when people are even scared of proxmox or anything not VMware or MAYBE hyperV

              • @TCB13English
                -4•9 months ago

                Since you are apparently on an anti-proxmox crusade. Have you tried that iscus thing in enterprise? Like a very large scale production deployment?

                Maybe if you read the comment I linked you’ll find that that’s precisely what we had with Proxmox and then migrated to LXD.

                I am curious if anyone dares to use it in enterprise when people are even scared of proxmox or anything not VMware or MAYBE hyperV

                I guess it depends on the kind of “enterprise” we’re talking about. If your “enterprise” is somewhat of a provider / ISP they should be okay with LXD. A lot of service providers are running some form of LXC/LXD right now with very good results.

                If by “enterprise” you mean your typical 400+ people company that does something not related to tech with an overworked and barely competent IT / infrastructure team, then the answer is: they won’t move out of vmware ever.

        • @TCB13English
          -9•9 months ago

          Well, suit yourself. :)

        • @TCB13English
          1•9 months ago

          Oh yeah, zfs send ftw. I personally run most of stuff on BTRFS and I can say the same.

    • @ArcherEnglish
      2•9 months ago

      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!

      • ɐɥOEnglish
        -4•9 months ago

        sounds like a skill issue to me

        • @ArcherEnglish
          3•9 months ago

          sounds like a skill issue to me

          Ah yes, I see the forums are leaking again