Proxmox VE: Import Wizard for Migrating VMware ESXi VMs

I did this recently and it was honestly a walk in the park. Was quite pleasantly surprised when all my vm's just booted up and resumed work as normal. The only thing I was worried about was the mac addresses used for dedicated dhcp leases, but all of that "just worked" too!

Important because VMWare's been acquired by Broadcom (November 22, 2023) and Broadcom's been turning the screws on customers to get more money. Many folks are looking for alternatives. More context:

2024/02/26 Can confirm a current Broadcom VMware customer went from $8M renewal to $100M https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39509506

2024/02/13 VMware vSphere ESXi free edition is dead https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39359534

2024/01/18 VMware End of Availability of perpetual licensing and associated products https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39048120

2024/01/15 Order/license chaos for VMware products after Broadcom takeover https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38998615

2023/12/12 VMware transition to subscription, end of sale of perpetual license https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38615315

I have been running proxmox at home for a few months now.

It has been, to say the least, an adventure. And I have nothing but good things to say about Proxmox at this point. Its running not only my home related items (MQTT, Homeassitant), it also plays host to some of the projects I'm working on (postgres, go apps, etc...) rather than runing some sort of local dev.

If you need to exit vmware, proxmox seems like a good way to go.

For the sake of completeness, xcp-ng is an alternative to migrate VMware ESXi VMs too!