Software's free version was a good fit for tinkerers and hobbyists.

Since Broadcom’s $61 billion acquisition of VMware closed in November 2023, Broadcom has been charging ahead with major changes to the company’s personnel and products. In December, Broadcom began laying off thousands of employees and stopped selling perpetually licensed versions of VMware products, pushing its customers toward more stable and lucrative software subscriptions instead. In January, it ended its partner programs, potentially disrupting sales and service for many users of its products.

This week, Broadcom is making a change that is smaller in scale but possibly more relevant for home users of its products: The free version of VMware’s vSphere Hypervisor, also known as ESXi, is being discontinued.

      • Yggstyle@lemmy.worldEnglish
        36·
        11 months ago

        There are a variety of options available with near feature parity. Killing the free version effectively cut out lab users which may as well say: we sure would like people to start training on a new platform. People use what they are comfortable with… and tend to carry a hatchet for companies that burn them.

        This was a short sighted play which ultimately will result in the platform dying slowly as the workforce changes. They cut off new blood: less people will be proficient with their platform and more will be pushing for a switch to the competition. In addition to the loss of the free version they massively ramped prices. They won’t last. Right now the companies that are too big to pivot are already starting to weigh the costs of transitioning vs the squeeze. The C-suite are idiots.

      • RubberDuck@lemmy.worldEnglish
        92·
        11 months ago

        With infrastructure as code, vm management has become even more easy. A lot of companies are standardizing their vm park based on new deployment and management techniques e Sometimes in IaaS platforms (a fancy name for externally managed, rented hardware) but the VM has a long life ahead.

  • BigDanishGuy@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    33·
    11 months ago

    LOL was about to implement esxi, on a rather beefy surplus server, to run all my students’ PCs on since win 11 won’t boot on their hardware from 24h2… Guess my students won’t get to use VMware and the purchase approval I just got for a few workstation pro licenses wasn’t needed.

    Proxmox for baremetal hypervisor, or? I’ve got a bunch of windows server licenses as well, I think some for hyper-v server as well. What would you implement?

    • habitualTartare@lemmy.worldEnglish
      7·
      11 months ago

      I’m happy with proxmox in a non-production environment/homeLab. Stable and straightforward.

      Just found out from your comment that windows is shutting the door completely on CPUs that don’t support POPCNT. There’s config settings to install Windows 11 on legacy hardware (old CPU, tpm chips, etc) but who knows when they’ll pull the plug on that.

    • Voroxpete@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      5·
      11 months ago

      Here’s a really nice guide to XCP-NG vs Proxmox (Video creator’s preference is for XCP, so there’s an acknowledged bias there, but it’s still a solid rundown of the two).

      Personally, I just run straight KVM on Debian or Ubuntu servers, but that’s not for everyone. Web based management for KVM is still kind of rough. Cockpit is getting there, but it’s missing key features, and the web based graphical console absolutely sucks.

    • Lettuce eat lettuce@lemmy.mlEnglish
      5·
      11 months ago

      Proxmox is really good, same with XCP-ng. You could also run something like Debian server and roll your own KVM based platform if you have the chops.

      Overall, lots of solid choices in the Open Source realm. I would avoid proprietary solutions, since that’s largely the reason the whole VMWare situation happened in the first place.

    • Brkdncr@lemmy.worldEnglish
      42·
      11 months ago

      Hyper-V or nutanix community. those will be the dominant hypervisors in the near future. I can see nutanix really taking off soon if they cant reach some of the features that VMware had. Hyper-v is sort of stuck since their host OS layer sucks, but it’s also pretty cheap.

      • Passerby6497@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        11 months ago

        They’ve “redone” hyper-v a bit with the Azure HCI stack, but yeah, the OS layer sucks. Even more so than normal windows server.

  • Swarfega@lemm.eeEnglish
    181·
    11 months ago

    I know internally Broadcom is screwing over VMware employees with new contracts. I’ve heard of staff pushing back three times so far to get contracts changed.

    • cm0002@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      11 months ago

      And everyone saw that coming

      I wonder where all the “wE jUSt GoTTa WAiT aNd SEe” people are now?