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.

  • @[email protected]English
    32•9 months ago

    The moment that broadcom bought them the writing was on the wall. Many people have already jumped ship.

    • NomecksEnglish
      2•9 months ago

      A lot of people can’t jump ship, at least not within a year or two.

      • @Passerby6497English
        5•9 months ago

        I’ve got a client who is currently a vmWare shop that (along with moving datacenters) is migrating to hyper-v when they rebuild.

        • NomecksEnglish
          2•9 months ago

          I hope you mean Azure Stack HCI, seeing how Hyper-V 2019 is the end of the line.

          • @Passerby6497English
            2•9 months ago

            I do. we’ve already deployed it internally once, and will be deploying additional clusters over the coming year.

            • NomecksEnglish
              1•9 months ago

              How do you like it so far? I’ve got a few customers interested.

              • @Passerby6497English
                2•9 months ago

                It’s alright, but it really isn’t my favorite. We spun up the cluster using professional support services from our vendor and it was rocky af, and the built in dashboard reporting is worthless if you want to know what’s been provisioned instead of straight utilization. Alerting has been another struggle for us as well.

                I’m sure it would work better when more integrated with azure, but for our 100% local workload it leaves a lot to be desired. But thankfully since it’s windows based and manageable with powershell I was able to write a custom report to surface the metrics my teams and management care about.