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VMware vSphere ESXi free edition is dead

kb.vmware.com

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Re: VMware vSphere ESXi free edition is dead

#31

Post by NBJack »

wannacboatmovie wrote: post #19
remir wrote: post #7

*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…

*for now

Re: VMware vSphere ESXi free edition is dead

#32

Post by sokoloff »

remir wrote: post #7

*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.

There is no substitute product offered by Broadcom.

There are several substitute products, Proxmox being a common one.

Re: VMware vSphere ESXi free edition is dead

#33

Post by zamadatix »

JackSlateur wrote: post #26
wannacboatmovie wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Well, obviously, there is "currently no substitude product offered unless you are willing to move to something else" In which case, of course, Proxmox is there since years. So why would you encrap yourself with hyper-v and postpone the show for only a couple of years when you could implement a robust solution ?

Hyper-V isn't so bad in traditional enterprise. You can buy a perpetual license on something which includes patches for the next 10 years (despite people saying for the last 10 years Microsoft is imminently going to force new products to subscription only), that license can cover the guest VM Window licensing, and support comes through the same contract you manage your desktop/laptop clients from. It integrates with the management of the rest of your domain and is, generally, actually pretty decent what it does for the given customer use case.

If you're building a hip new product with a bunch of Linux VMs you defined yourself greenfield then it probably seems a little ridiculous, especially since most of your stuff is likely containers or at least hybrid cloud conscious out of the gate. At that point you can grab a low cost subscription for your couple of servers and call it a day for a few grand a year.

Nutanix is probably the option most people looking at (or currently using) Hyper-V would be weighing right now.

Re: VMware vSphere ESXi free edition is dead

#34

Post by zamadatix »

threesevenths wrote: post #24
Aleklart wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

wdym not crippled and powerful? it was always a literal cripleware that not only lacks of basic VM flexibility (usb/devices passthru etc) and cant run any guest except windows and linux, but also hard to mange due to lack of basic cli / gui. It has no advanced features that were added for datacenter edition back in 2016 and in fact pretty much dead as windows server itself microsoft virtualization is long stuck in th…

Let’s clear some things up here if you don’t mind. All HyperV hosts can only run Windows and certain Linux distros, this is not a limitation of the free offering. Passthrough is also not available for most types of hardware in all versions of HyperV. An imperfect workaround is to use passthrough with Remote Desktop. I’m not telling you it’s good I’m telling you it exists. HyperV server has a basic cli interface and i…

> All HyperV hosts can only run Windows and certain Linux distros, this is not a limitation of the free offering.

I'm not sure where y'all are picking this up from, FreeBSD is even officially supported. I've run Redox and Haiku in it as well.

For non-production use cases though I recommend grabbing the latest Windows Server via a trial instead. The downside is you get 180 days per period and it can be renewed for 3 periods before it expires. The upside is you can just install Server Datacenter and get the kitchen sink, including full desktop. You do one VM migration and re-install and then the when that trial fully expires it's time to upgrade to the newer version of Windows Server anyways.

Re: VMware vSphere ESXi free edition is dead

#35

Post by I_Am_Nous »

zamadatix wrote: post #34
threesevenths wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let’s clear some things up here if you don’t mind. All HyperV hosts can only run Windows and certain Linux distros, this is not a limitation of the free offering. Passthrough is also not available for most types of hardware in all versions of HyperV. An imperfect workaround is to use passthrough with Remote Desktop. I’m not telling you it’s good I’m telling you it exists. HyperV server has a basic cli interface and i…

> All HyperV hosts can only run Windows and certain Linux distros, this is not a limitation of the free offering. I'm not sure where y'all are picking this up from, FreeBSD is even officially supported. I've run Redox and Haiku in it as well. For non-production use cases though I recommend grabbing the latest Windows Server via a trial instead. The downside is you get 180 days per period and it can be renewed for 3 p…

A hot tip is that Datacenter licensing allows you to activate VMs using a special CD key, so you can run a cluster of fully licensed Windows Server Standard VMs. Not sure if the Datacenter trial also works in the same way but I'd be kind of surprised if it didn't.

Re: VMware vSphere ESXi free edition is dead

#38

Post by CoolCold »

stunpix wrote: post #30
Saris wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Proxmox is a nice UI and extra utilities on top of KVM for VMs, KVM can be installed on any Linux system. I'd install Proxmox in a VM and give it a try if you want to see how it goes.

Just for note: Proxmox also can run containers (not Docker) beside VMs.

I tend to use those VE, virtual environment to make distinguish between containers, VMs and lightweight full OS based containers, since the days of using OpenVZ - may be i'll like that naming too.

Re: VMware vSphere ESXi free edition is dead

#39

Post by CoolCold »

IntelMiner wrote: post #12
IronWolve wrote: post #10

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.

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-i…

most wondering thing for me - escalating "VMWare OVA disk.." questions to CEO level - has he better things to do or it's some small company where CEO still knows everyone?
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