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Broadcom-owned VMware kills the free version of ESXi virtualization software (arstechnica.com)

submitted 9 months ago by GlitzyArmrest to c/technology

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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.

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[–] [email protected] 41 points 9 months ago (6 children)

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 11 points 9 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Weird as it is, it's not as radical as I thought:

For Intel's chips, it was added as part of SSE4.2 in the original first-generation Core architecture, codenamed Nehalem. In AMD's processors, it's included in SSE4a, first used in Phenom, Athlon, and Sempron CPUs based on the K10 architecture. These architectures date back to 2008 and 2007, respectively.

Of course they probably could have avoided it, but a 15 year old PC is as close to ewaste as it gets. Even if you could run Linux on it, a modern smartwatch probably has more computing power, let alone a smartphone or raspberry pi. The main use could be as a space heater.

[–] cm0002 4 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Yea there's plenty of reasons to shit on MS, but dropping support for 15+ years old CPUs isn't one of them lol

If someone is being affected by this, then maybe it's time for them to upgrade their shit lmao

[–] [email protected] 8 points 9 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.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

Here is an alternative Piped link(s):

XCP-NG vs Proxmox

Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.

I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago

Check xcp-ng with xen-orchestra.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

I really like XCP-ng. Imo the interface is more understandable and polished than Proxmox. Similar to vSphere + vCenter, but more advanced options as well.

[–] Brkdncr 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

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 1 points 9 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.