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.
You are either going all in with VMware or you’re dead to them. Full suite or nothing, take your pick.
The moment that broadcom bought them the writing was on the wall. Many people have already jumped ship.
To what?
I’ve got a client who is currently a vmWare shop that (along with moving datacenters) is migrating to hyper-v when they rebuild.
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.
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!
sounds like a skill issue to me
sounds like a skill issue to me
Ah yes, I see the forums are leaking again
