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Broadcom terminates VMware's free ESXi hypervisor (www.theregister.com)

submitted 1 year ago by ylai@lemmy.ml to c/homelab@lemmy.ml

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[+] cybersandwich@lemmy.world 13 points 1 year ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

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[–] quirzle@kbin.social 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The reality is that nobody's learning much useful from Free ESXi, as you need vCenter for any of the good stuff. They want you using the eval license for that, which gives you the full experience but only for 60 days.

Still, there's a lot of folks running free ESXi in labs (home and otherwise) and other small environments that may need to expand at some point. They're killing a lot of good will and entry-level market saturation for what appears (to me at least) literally zero benefit. The paid software is the same, so they're not developing any less. And they weren't offering support with the free license anyway, so they're not saving anything there.

[–] stevestevesteve@lemmy.world 6 points 1 year ago

Thanks, I hate it. Not that free esxi was super great but at least it was something

[–] killeronthecorner@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago

I googled "how to migrate from esxi to proxmox" last week. I must be psychic.

[–] autotldr@lemmings.world 4 points 1 year ago

This is the best summary I could come up with:

The free cut of ESXi was only able to run on limited number of cores, addressed a modest quantity of memory, and lacked many management niceties.

Justin Warren, the principal analyst of consultancy Pivot Nine, told The Register the demise of free vSphere means "Broadcom has pretty clearly signaled that it is no longer interested in smaller VMware customers.

Warren rated the change "another gift to competitors like Nutanix, Scale Computing, Microsoft with Hyper-V/Azure Stack, or Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization (via KubeVirt).

Pre-acquisition VMware proudly touted the 4,000-plus small clouds that ran its stack, and applauded their ability to offer services that hyperscalers could not – especially providing sovereign clouds that lacked the complex legal entanglements that see multinational hyperscalers sometimes beholden to laws of their home jurisdictions.

Meanwhile, the implications of Broadcom's decision to end perpetual licenses for VMware products continue to be analyzed by users.

One VMware consultant of The Register's acquaintance told us the change means some workloads now appear to be cheaper to run on bare metal than under vSphere.

The original article contains 575 words, the summary contains 174 words. Saved 70%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

[–] sonori@beehaw.org 4 points 1 year ago

I’m amazed it held out for so long. Small stacks and getting people used to useing your tool sounds like a good lon green strategy, and Boradcom doesn’t do those.