7 ms·

VMware vSphere ESXi free edition is dead

50 points by 4878241143 3y ago

NetworkPerson 3y ago
Oh look, it’s that last nudge I needed to go ahead and move my home stuff to HyperV. Suppose I could fire up proxmox but meh, I’m already too familiar with HyperV for how much my clients use it.
- akadruid1 3y ago
  Hyper-V Server has also been discontinued, although the 2019 release will be supported for a while yet https://www.theregister.com/2021/08/31/hyper_v_server_discontinued/ https://www.theregister.com/2021/08/31/hyper_v_server_discon...
  - schlauerfox 3y ago
    Hyper-V Server was a free product hypervisor. Hyper-V is a licensed windows feature that is still available on Server 2022 and beyond.
bodeadly 3y ago
Dread. 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?
- Saris 3y ago
  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.
  - stunpix 3y ago
    Just for note: Proxmox also can run containers (not Docker) beside VMs.
    - CoolCold 3y ago
      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.
- patmorgan23 3y ago
  Xcp-ng is also an option (it's based on Zen)
- candiddevmike 3y ago
  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/qemu https://github.com/candiddev/shared/tree/main/containers/qem...
lycan1999 3y ago
XCP-NG is another option right now. But this is going to fully end and kill the software.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
mannyv 3y ago
ugh, forgot to download this. Luckily I'm stuck on 6.5/7.0 because my hardware is old.
- rinvn 3y ago
  https://mirror.mahanserver.net/VMware/ESXI/ https://mirror.mahanserver.net/VMware/ESXI/ dont forget to compare-check MD5 in vmware pages
remir 3y ago
*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.
- wannacboatmovie 3y ago
  > 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-server-2019 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.
  - my123 3y ago
    Hyper-V Server stops at the 2019 release - post 2029 it's dead (no Hyper-V Server 2022)
    - wannacboatmovie 3y ago
      So that buys you five years at essentially no cost to figure out your next move. I'm not complaining.
  - Aleklart 3y ago
    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 the past and forgotten, iykwim if you need something more or less sane luke esxi, proxmox or even xen are way to go.
IronWolve 3y ago
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.
- SOLAR_FIELDS 3y ago
  Proxmox isn’t as nice of a hypervisor as esxi, but it’s certainly good enough these days
  - windexh8er 3y ago
    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.
- IntelMiner 3y ago
  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
ChrisArchitect 3y ago
[dupe] Some more discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39352090 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39352090
spicyusername 3y ago
I 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.
- merb 3y ago
  I mean the pricing for essential plus kit (3 hosts) was raised by like 2x, if something will be twice as expensive as before, something is wrong.
patrakov 3y ago
Very 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.
Logans_Run 3y ago
Although not the author, a comment made on the issue by someone on another forum [1] expresses it much more eloquently than I can. " Ignore the SMB/homelabber at your peril... 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). 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. 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). 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. 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. 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... " [1] https://forums.theregister.com/forum/all/2024/02/13/broadcom_ends_free_esxi_vsphere/#c_4810319 https://forums.theregister.com/forum/all/2024/02/13/broadcom...
jbverschoor 3y ago
Loving proxmox, so I don't care
KiDD 3y ago
This sucks!

50 points by 4878241143 3y ago

Oh look, it’s that last nudge I needed to go ahead and move my home stuff to HyperV. Suppose I could fire up proxmox but meh, I’m already too familiar with HyperV for how much my clients use it.

akadruid1 3y ago
Hyper-V Server has also been discontinued, although the 2019 release will be supported for a while yet https://www.theregister.com/2021/08/31/hyper_v_server_discontinued/ https://www.theregister.com/2021/08/31/hyper_v_server_discon...
- schlauerfox 3y ago
  Hyper-V Server was a free product hypervisor. Hyper-V is a licensed windows feature that is still available on Server 2022 and beyond.

bodeadly 3y ago

Dread. 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?

Saris 3y ago
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.
- stunpix 3y ago
  Just for note: Proxmox also can run containers (not Docker) beside VMs.
  - CoolCold 3y ago
    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.
patmorgan23 3y ago
Xcp-ng is also an option (it's based on Zen)
candiddevmike 3y ago
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/qemu https://github.com/candiddev/shared/tree/main/containers/qem...

lycan1999 3y ago

XCP-NG is another option right now. But this is going to fully end and kill the software.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

mannyv 3y ago

ugh, forgot to download this. Luckily I'm stuck on 6.5/7.0 because my hardware is old.

rinvn 3y ago
https://mirror.mahanserver.net/VMware/ESXI/ https://mirror.mahanserver.net/VMware/ESXI/ dont forget to compare-check MD5 in vmware pages

remir 3y ago

*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.

wannacboatmovie 3y ago
> 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-server-2019 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.
- my123 3y ago
  Hyper-V Server stops at the 2019 release - post 2029 it's dead (no Hyper-V Server 2022)
  - wannacboatmovie 3y ago
    So that buys you five years at essentially no cost to figure out your next move. I'm not complaining.
- Aleklart 3y ago
  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 the past and forgotten, iykwim if you need something more or less sane luke esxi, proxmox or even xen are way to go.

IronWolve 3y ago

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.

SOLAR_FIELDS 3y ago
Proxmox isn’t as nice of a hypervisor as esxi, but it’s certainly good enough these days
- windexh8er 3y ago
  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.
IntelMiner 3y ago
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

ChrisArchitect 3y ago

[dupe] Some more discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39352090 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39352090

spicyusername 3y ago

I 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.

merb 3y ago
I mean the pricing for essential plus kit (3 hosts) was raised by like 2x, if something will be twice as expensive as before, something is wrong.

patrakov 3y ago

Very 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.

Logans_Run 3y ago

Although not the author, a comment made on the issue by someone on another forum [1] expresses it much more eloquently than I can. " Ignore the SMB/homelabber at your peril... 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). 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. 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). 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. 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. 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... " [1] https://forums.theregister.com/forum/all/2024/02/13/broadcom_ends_free_esxi_vsphere/#c_4810319 https://forums.theregister.com/forum/all/2024/02/13/broadcom...

jbverschoor 3y ago

Loving proxmox, so I don't care

KiDD 3y ago

This sucks!