VMware ESXi is not free anymore

Amadex

VMware vSphere Hypervisor (free edition) is no longer available on the VMware website
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. For further details regarding the affected products and this change, we encourage you to review the following blog post: https://blogs.vmware.com/cloud-foundation/2024/01/22/vmware-end-of-availability-of-perpetual-licensing-and-saas-services/

Source: https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/2107518

Amadex

I guess there will be a big party at Proxmox. 🎉

AuroraZero

Wasn't this supposed to happen like last year?

Was it just a rumor back then?

cservers

That was indeed supposed to happen roughly some time ago, so it doesn't surprise me this move...

Otus9051

Biggest surprise to me here is that it even was free.

cservers

@Otus9051 said:
Biggest surprise to me here is that it even was free.

It was free, but rather limited at that in some ways... but the market is becoming more Proxmox-ly related, so yeah...

Crab

@cservers said:

@Otus9051 said:
Biggest surprise to me here is that it even was free.

It was free, but rather limited at that in some ways... but the market is becoming more Proxmox-ly related, so yeah...

The main two limitations were that a single VM can only have 8 cores and it couldn't be connected to vSphere for additional failover functionality. For a home lab / standalone virtualization it was working great, so it is a bummer to lose it.