*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).<p>Regrettably, there is currently no substitute product offered.*<p>You can feel that the employee that wrote this knows this is a sinking ship.
Very well worded:<p>"VMware vSphere Hypervisor (free edition) is no longer available on the VMware website"<p>Almost an invitation to download it from various alternative places.
Dread.<p>I run all of my Windows Server / 10 / 11 client VMs on ESXi for testing my Java software product.<p>I'm getting the impression that proxmox is the only real alternative for Windows guests?<p>I do need to get packet captures from the host so maybe Linux is better than something like Hyper-V?
I appreciate the fact that whoever wrote that is clearly unhappy with the decision.<p>Another bit of good news for those making money off Proxmox, Kubevirt, and OpenShift.<p>Hard to see how vSphere / ESXi survives this acquisition, long term, even if many companies limp along for the next so many years.
Although not the author, a comment made on the issue by someone on another forum [1] expresses it much more eloquently than I can.<p>" <i>Ignore the SMB/homelabber at your peril...</i><p>VMware (20+ years ago) cast their net out as far as possible. They embraced partners, channels, users big and small, experienced and beginner. That formed the foundation of a massive ecosystem of community knowledge around their products that made them attractive (in addition to the stability & ease of use). None of their rivals ever came close to this. That's part of the reason they have such a massive market share (80% of VM workloads not running in the cloud run on VMware).<p>ESXi free was extremely limited, but it allowed users easy access to the hypervisor to deploy it in a home environment to see what the fuss is about. It gets beginners/novices interested in the product, and eventually the add-on products. From there it's an easy hop to VMUG licensing and additional products to get familiar with the rest of the VMware stack.<p>Those novice users are usually employed at entry-level jobs at smaller companies, and they tend to stick with what they know or have learned, so ESXi free becomes an easy deployment for those businesses. From there it's an easy hop to adding additional licences as they realise they need a vCenter and more of the advanced features to stay on top of everything (and the beauty of ESXi is that it's just a licence key change to unlock all of the features, no reinstall of a full version over the top of the free one).<p>Those novice users gain experience, some move on to larger companies in more senior positions, and that knowledge, experience and product inertia continue to snowball into more VMware deployments, more add-on products used (maybe some of the vRealize/Aria stuff, or NSX, or vSAN) and you have a full ecosystem of end-users who are advocates for the solutions used.<p>That was certainly my journey - I deployed ESXi free about 15 years ago onto a single host in my network lab to see what the fuss was about. It ended up sparking an interest and knowledge in a field that culminated in me eventually being employed by VMware and working with their biggest customers and partners globally.<p>You can ignore those SMBs and home users and still make money, but don't be surprised if in 5+ years time you have a massively reduced market share further up the tree with large commercial/enterprise customers. With Broadcoms pricing changes I'd suspect it'll be even sooner than that... "<p>[1] <a href="https://forums.theregister.com/forum/all/2024/02/13/broadcom_ends_free_esxi_vsphere/#c_4810319" rel="nofollow">https://forums.theregister.com/forum/all/2024/02/13/broadcom...</a>
[dupe]<p>Some more discussion: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39352090">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39352090</a>
Oh look, it’s that last nudge I needed to go ahead and move my home stuff to HyperV.<p>Suppose I could fire up proxmox but meh, I’m already too familiar with HyperV for how much my clients use it.