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.
+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.