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.

  • @habitualTartareEnglish
    11•10 months ago

    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.

    • @[email protected]English
      8•10 months ago

      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.

      • @cm0002English
        4•10 months ago

        Yea there’s plenty of reasons to shit on MS, but dropping support for 15+ years old CPUs isn’t one of them lol

        If someone is being affected by this, then maybe it’s time for them to upgrade their shit lmao