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.
Proxmox my beloved
Did you ever try LXD/Incus?
Nope. I’m pretty happy with proxmox and I dont want to change a perfectly fine, running system
+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.
Oh yeah it runs fine until they kill their free tier like ESXi did or… it completely fails over and over again.
You are either going all in with VMware or you’re dead to them. Full suite or nothing, take your pick.
For the cost, SMB is going to walk away. There are millions of SMB’s.
SMBs are not the target. Companies with a sizeable vSAN investment, huge amounts of VMware based automation and the fortune 1000 are. MSRP on the cheap license is going to be around $275/core, minimum 16 cores per socket.
That’s simply short sighted.
So they ignore the Fortune 1000+1 (the up-and-coming 1000). They also stop providing a learning/familiarity path.
I’m already seeing SMBs looking at KVM, Proxmox, Xen, etc. When these young engineers/managers/architects grow and move to Enterprise, what are they going to recommend when VMware is $300/core?
I’m all for (as in I push) recognizing the value of (even expensive) licensing when it reduces engineering costs and complexity, but that’s what I’d call a “metric shitload”.
A mid-size business could easily justify transitioning to just about any other VM solution when faced with that kind of increase. One 16-core host is now $5k in licensing, practically doubling the cost - and that’s an annual cost for years - saddling “future IT” with that cost that can now no longer be invested elsewhere.
Now imagine you have 10 such boxes.
LOL was about to implement esxi, on a rather beefy surplus server, to run all my students’ PCs on since win 11 won’t boot on their hardware from 24h2… Guess my students won’t get to use VMware and the purchase approval I just got for a few workstation pro licenses wasn’t needed.
Proxmox for baremetal hypervisor, or? I’ve got a bunch of windows server licenses as well, I think some for hyper-v server as well. What would you implement?
I really like XCP-ng. Imo the interface is more understandable and polished than Proxmox. Similar to vSphere + vCenter, but more advanced options as well.
Proxmox is really good, same with XCP-ng. You could also run something like Debian server and roll your own KVM based platform if you have the chops.
Overall, lots of solid choices in the Open Source realm. I would avoid proprietary solutions, since that’s largely the reason the whole VMWare situation happened in the first place.
Hyper-V or nutanix community. those will be the dominant hypervisors in the near future. I can see nutanix really taking off soon if they cant reach some of the features that VMware had. Hyper-v is sort of stuck since their host OS layer sucks, but it’s also pretty cheap.
