And in the end, KVM stands as the best free option with a wide range of support and 3rd party applications using it. ProxMox, Virtualbox on kvm, etc.
Proxmox isn’t as nice of a hypervisor as esxi, but it’s certainly good enough these days
VMware vSphere ESXi free edition is dead
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Re: VMware vSphere ESXi free edition is dead
#12And in the end, KVM stands as the best free option with a wide range of support and 3rd party applications using it. ProxMox, Virtualbox on kvm, etc.
I recently started at a new role where they offer a VMware OVA disk image for their software solution (basically just Ubuntu running Apache/MySQL/Ruby on Rails)
They were preparing to spin up an entire EC2 dedicated instance plus purchase another VMware license for me to onboard with for learning. I was absolutely pleading with them to just let me use KVM, I already have a Linux box at home I can just run the VM as-is for free
After pressing the CEO about it he finally relented and let me set it up on my little home server. From what I can tell thanks to virtio and KVM treating Linux as a first class citizen it actually feels faster than the VMware setup
I'm absolutely chomping at the bit to push for us to become "hypervisor agnostic" and bring on Hyper-V and Proxmox at the very least. There's no sense in being tied to VMware anymore as customers are scrambling to escape it
Re: VMware vSphere ESXi free edition is dead
#13[dupe]
Some more discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39352090
Re: VMware vSphere ESXi free edition is dead
#14I appreciate the fact that whoever wrote that is clearly unhappy with the decision.
Another bit of good news for those making money off Proxmox, Kubevirt, and OpenShift.
Hard to see how vSphere / ESXi survives this acquisition, long term, even if many companies limp along for the next so many years.
Re: VMware vSphere ESXi free edition is dead
#15Dread. I run all of my Windows Server / 10 / 11 client VMs on ESXi for testing my Java software product. I'm getting the impression that proxmox is the only real alternative for Windows guests? I do need to get packet captures from the host so maybe Linux is better than something like Hyper-V?
Xcp-ng is also an option (it's based on Zen)
Re: VMware vSphere ESXi free edition is dead
#16Dread. I run all of my Windows Server / 10 / 11 client VMs on ESXi for testing my Java software product. I'm getting the impression that proxmox is the only real alternative for Windows guests? I do need to get packet captures from the host so maybe Linux is better than something like Hyper-V?
You can run QEMU/KVM using docker/podman. I made a simple container here for it that lets you use cloud-init: https://github.com/candiddev/shared/tree/main/containers/qem...
Re: VMware vSphere ESXi free edition is dead
#17Very well worded:
"VMware vSphere Hypervisor (free edition) is no longer available on the VMware website"
Almost an invitation to download it from various alternative places.
Re: VMware vSphere ESXi free edition is dead
#18And in the end, KVM stands as the best free option with a wide range of support and 3rd party applications using it. ProxMox, Virtualbox on kvm, etc.
Proxmox isn’t as nice of a hypervisor as esxi, but it’s certainly good enough these days
I would say, in fact, it's better. A lot of the things ProxMox does out of the box would require both ESXi and vSphere. LXC and VM, Ceph and SDN are all native to the latest version of Proxmox. And since it's based on Debian you can do nice things to the underlying system that makes life easier. For example, in my homelab I can run Tailscale natively on the host which means full OOB management from anywhere. Proxmox also has a fantastic API at this point.
I feel as though, roughly 2 years ago, Proxmox became better in the simplistic manner of doing the right things like how ESXi became the defacto hypervisor. VMWare's antiquated management for upgrades of the entire ecosystem became a nightmare in the last 5 years. I worked in the NSX Security group for a while and just getting it installed internally was a nightmare of dependencies. RIP ESXi, the nostalgia will live on, but it was past its prime.
Re: VMware vSphere ESXi free edition is dead
#19*Along with the termination of perpetual licensing, Broadcom has also decided to discontinue the Free ESXi Hypervisor, marking it as EOGA (End of General Availability). Regrettably, there is currently no substitute product offered.* You can feel that the employee that wrote this knows this is a sinking ship.
> Regrettably, there is currently no substitute product offered.
Not quite.
Microsoft gives away Hyper-V Server for free, no license key needed. It is not time limited or crippled in any way.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/evaluate-hyper-v-...
It runs in Server Core mode and the learning curve is much steeper outside an AD domain or for non-Windows turbonerds; but once set up properly it is extremely powerful and I prefer it over VMware. Linux support for Hyper-V is built-in and outstanding.
Re: VMware vSphere ESXi free edition is dead
#20*Along with the termination of perpetual licensing, Broadcom has also decided to discontinue the Free ESXi Hypervisor, marking it as EOGA (End of General Availability). Regrettably, there is currently no substitute product offered.* You can feel that the employee that wrote this knows this is a sinking ship.
> Regrettably, there is currently no substitute product offered. Not quite. Microsoft gives away Hyper-V Server for free, no license key needed. It is not time limited or crippled in any way. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/evaluate-hyper-v-... It runs in Server Core mode and the learning curve is much steeper outside an AD domain or for non-Windows turbonerds; but once set up properly it is extremely powe…
Hyper-V Server stops at the 2019 release - post 2029 it's dead (no Hyper-V Server 2022)