VMware Revives Its Free ESXi Hypervisor (theregister.com) 67
VMware has resumed offering a free hypervisor. News of the offering emerged in a throwaway line in the Release Notes for version 8.0 Update 3e of the Broadcom business unit's ESXi hypervisor. From a report: Just below the "What's New" section of that document is the statement: "Broadcom makes available the VMware vSphere Hypervisor version 8, an entry-level hypervisor. You can download it free of charge from the Broadcom Support portal."
VMware offered a free version of ESXi for years, and it was beloved by home lab operators and vAdmins who needed something to tinker with. But in February 2024, VMware discontinued it on grounds that it was dropping perpetual licenses and moving to subscriptions.
VMware offered a free version of ESXi for years, and it was beloved by home lab operators and vAdmins who needed something to tinker with. But in February 2024, VMware discontinued it on grounds that it was dropping perpetual licenses and moving to subscriptions.
I wouldn't download this.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
As long as there are no timebombs in the free licensing and it's compatible with my hardware, I'll try it out for personal use.
But it's far, far, past the point where my using it at home would ever get me to recommend it to a client. That's never going to happen.
Here, Here (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
This is LOVING capitalism actually. If there is a free option, now in this capitalistic society, the paid options have to adjust.
capitalism isn't a panacea (Score:2)
Everyone needs a healthy dose of skepticism for capitalism. It's a constant struggle to make the world a better place, and sometimes worshipping the almighty dollar gets in the way of broader goals.
So rather than thinking "Capitalism is good, therefor non-capitalism is bad." People need to dig much deeper on what is good and bad, under what conditions, and what goals are trying to be achieved, and what compromises we're willing to accept. (Capitalism, like socialism, is a compromise)
Re: capitalism isn't a panacea (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
A lot of systems have been demonstrated to work. Depends in your society's goals.
And when I throw around the word capitalism, I'm talking about the entire system of raising money through the sale of shares to share holders who in turn demand a return in that investment. The existence of a legally-protected profit motive in all interactions involving money is the consequence and usually the goal. You can still have a market system without having capitalism (but the reverse isn't true).
Capitalism may be the b
Re: (Score:1)
I'd use it in a home lab or for running a few small home servers. I wouldn't let it near anything intended for production. I use VMWare workstation at home to play around with OSes, along with qemu and x86box. At work I'm helping with the effort to dockerize everything so we can get it all off of vmware.
ESXi ran my homelab for a decade. It was one of the best by far, even with the restrictions lacking centralized management (vSphere was always their profit center)
VMUG gave me cheap access to vSphere and new products and at some point work was willing to pay my vmug subscription for me.
VMUG licensing was a per-year renewal, so in 2024 my homelab virtual hosts all shut down with no legal option to renew.
Even their multiple million dollars per year enterprise license required a corporate tax ID, even if I wa
Re: Here, Here (Score:2)
Re: Here, Here (Score:5, Interesting)
"You're confusing vSphere with vCenter."
No they are not. They had a single ESXi and whilst ESXi is only a component of vSphere (if you pay for a license) it is fair to separate freebie ESXi from "full fat" vSphere. VMware's marketing also wasn't that clear either, back in the day, until v4ish - I'm old enough to remember ESX and GSX and all that guff.
A Proxmox box has the full feature set for clustering built in - HA and file system(s). You now also get (it is still in alpha, but frankly better than some VMware releases I've dealt with over the decades) a thing called Proxmox Datacenter Manager - a sort of super vCentre. Ideal for MSPs (like my company).
20+ years I was a VMware fanboi. No more. I am doing another migration at the moment.
Re: (Score:1)
What do you use for backing up Proxmox and recovery?
Re: Proxmox Backup Server (Score:1)
Re: Here, Here (Score:5, Insightful)
They will just kill it again eventually, so why would you put the effort into it when you could instead work now with the same thing you will have to switch to later when they do so?
qemu (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I have the most sympathy for people who use that specific product, or even just player, for the reasons and with the excuses you've provided — but we're not talking about that here.
I have pointed out lots of times that vmware has the most credible graphics support of any VM, so I get using workstation. It's night and day compared to QXL, which is itself similarly superior to the emulated options on QEMU...
qemu2 (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
You might be interested in proxmox. It's the easiest thing to install and configure for any sort of server hosting. https://www.proxmox.com/en/ [proxmox.com]
Re: (Score:3)
As long as there are no timebombs in the free licensing and it's compatible with my hardware, I'll try it out for personal use.
I would suggest you inspect whatever licensing system they are implementing for the Free ESXi very thoroughly.
It just feels very suspicious to me at this point given the company's recent actions. Perhaps you can download it for free, but then it turns out to be tantamount to a trial. Or perhaps they will be updating the product soon to phone home to Broadcom servers and do
Re: (Score:2)
VMware Fusion went free some time ago and they don't make it particularly easy. You get stuck in a loop trying to navigate to a page that will let you either download or register to download. Last time I had better luck googling the thing to get me the actual product page. And then you have to have it available on your vmware account which sometimes gets stuck in a "verification" step that never passes or fails. And what's especially weird is that it's not as if they are even trying to make it so difficult
Re: I wouldn't download this.... (Score:2)
I bet a dollar there are timebombs.
The free Autocad clone Draftsight, free as in beer, didn't advertise their time bomb but they basically had a certificate expire in the application that forced all old versions to stop working.
Essentially killed the free beer with no workaround. A devilish way to ensure people can't keep using it for free.
Software companies want control and will do anything to keep it . For revenue.
Re: (Score:1)
Software companies want control and will do anything to keep it . For revenue.
How did that classic line from Princess Leia go in Star Wars? Something like, the more you tighten your grip the more people slip between your fingers.
The more software companies go to rent seeking measures on software the more people will develop and adopt open source alternatives. This started with basic things like boot loaders and text editors, as well as the tools to develop more software like compilers. They laid a foundation with operating systems so companies can't seek rent on the ability to boo
Re: (Score:2)
"get me to recommend it to a client"
what's your recommendation now?
Re: (Score:2)
I'm not particularly keen on it, but Hyper-V. I'd love to try something else but my employer is, at least for now, committed to it and I'm not going to put my own time and effort into it when it's not going anywhere.
Re: (Score:2)
My org has begun looking into Azure Local / Azure Stack HCI but it's not easy to set up, from what I've been told
Re: (Score:2)
But it's far, far, past the point where my using it at home would ever get me to recommend it to a client. That's never going to happen.
Well, that's the thing, isn't it? Broadcom would love you to train up your skills and be a specialist ... but they've already effectively turned their paid product into DEC Ultrix, so why should I put in the effort?
Re:I wouldn't download this.... (Score:4, Interesting)
It's trash. Free Trial = wet your beak and see if you like it. If they're gonna turn on and off free trials and be a terrible vendor with pricing and licensing, that's a hard NO from me.
Re: (Score:2)
Historically the free download of ESXi was always a 60 day trial that starts counting down after instllation.
Question is if Broadcom is still offering a way to get free vHypervisor keys to activate the base hypervisor features permanently.
Re: (Score:2)
There's an old saying in Tennessee—I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee—that says, 'Fool me once, shame on...shame on you.' Fool me—you can't get fooled again."
Re: (Score:2)
Why bother? (Score:5, Insightful)
Their market share is going to dwindle as enterprises that can get out of the platform are leaving. I'd rather spend my play time with Proxmox.
Re: (Score:2)
There are a few things I'd like to see from proxmox;
- Automatic load balancing ( DRS )
- Hot fail over. I know proxmox does HA, but that's not the same; I want a guest running on two ( or more ) hosts in lockstep so if one host fails, the cluster can activate the guest on another host immediately and carry on without any service interruption.
Don't get me wrong; love proxmox, those are just two features I'd love to see them bring to the platform.
Re: (Score:2)
Generally yes; one guest is designated as the "master", and any state changes are copied over to the standbys ( memory, CPU state, ect.. ). It's been a while, but I recall fail-over/activating a standby happening extremely quickly. I want to say in the sub-second range, but I could be misremembering.
It's bandwidth intensive, sure, but it's an amazing feature for mission critical applications.
Re: Why bother? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Think about it from an admin perspective; refactoring a vendor's application isn't always possible ( or getting them to refactor it ). We all have some legacy "cruft" floating around ( I have a remote desktop environment + SQL 2019 ) that can't/won't be refactored, but that still needs a respectable SLA attacked to.
While the RDA hosts can be load balanced, you still need a connection broker ( remote desktop ) if you're doing things like Remote App. With SQL2019 you can't really get that fancy unless the a
Re: (Score:2)
DRS.
For me, the biggest win for DRS is being able to patch a cluster without pissing around with where the VMs are. I ended up writing a shitty Powershell script that nearly works - https://github.com/gerdesj/Pat... [github.com] I don't bother updating that script because I'm only using it until my last VMware cluster is toast.
Proxmox HA is good enough. Note that it supports autostart too properly. A VMware HA cluster has never supported autostart - you have to bodge it.
DRS needs a properly expensive license. The o
Re: (Score:2)
Now, your hot failover - I never used that in 20 years, with VMware.
The Hot failover looks great in marketing pamphlets, And is really cool from a pure tech perspective,
But there are so many caveats that it is essentially never worth using.
Synchronous CPU state replication 1. Slows down your application; 2. Is massively consumptive of processor and network resources. 3. Actually cannot protect your application from many failure scenarios that a failover pair would do a better job against.
Example: Co
Re: (Score:2)
Hot fail over. I know proxmox does HA, but that's not the same
You mean like VMware Fault Tolerance? The feature is a gimmick. FT Logging inherently increases computation latency and generally cannot be used with critical applications such as Database servers or Microsoft Exchange. Lock step has a very high hardware cost and makes Hot failover implemented in software inherently unsuitable for latency-sensitive applications. The applications that FT or Hot failover would be suitable for just ha
Re: (Score:2)
Generally speaking I agree with you; FT/Hot failover ( whatever it's called ) is one of those things that sounds more useful than it is in in practice, but I'd disagree with you in that it has no use. I've used it on database servers, for instance. Yes, the overhead takes a bite out of performance, but for my use cases that was an acceptable trade off ( it was a vendor app whose vendor refused to reimplement so we were stuck with what we were stuck with, and it was mission critical so downtime was strictl
Re: (Score:2)
I've used it on database servers, for instance.
The synchronous nature of FT makes seem a very poor match for Database servers.
But is not just latency: it adds all the expense of adding a secondary without the resiliency.
Generally your database server software has failover clustering functionality. A minute or so of extra downtime for Windows clustering to fail the service over is going to be worth it when you consider how much more protection it adds to the equation to have a second server whose exe
Re: (Score:2)
Given the software in question, clustering wasn't an option.
Yes, I know; the software is crap. I don't disagree, but I don't have the option to NOT use it either. So...FT it was. And it worked, for all the issues with FT and DB servers, it worked for 10+ years.
Re: (Score:3)
Yup, It's a trap.
One day it's free then the poison pill comes down via an update and demand money.
Proxmox all the way.
Not gonna help (Score:5, Insightful)
Pretty sure the decisions that are making everyone flee Vmware are not going to be changed because hobbyists can once again run a neutered version.
Here, have the free version (Score:5, Insightful)
So we can screw you in the future, either by making you hostage whenever you sign up for the real deal, or by changing the rules again.
Sincerely, Broadcom, a Wish-I-Was-Oracle company.
You can download it free (Score:3)
... for now. All trust lost. Never again.
Why? (Score:2)
I feel as though everyone ( who hadn't already ) woke up when they pulled the free version and explored other options, discovered they were a far better deal, thus either made plans to jump ship or already did.
So I'm confused by what they are hoping to accomplish with this.
To late (Score:4, Funny)
Damage Control? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
This.
Literally just migrated two of our three host servers from VMware to Hyper-V Cluster this past weekend. The third will follow soon. Once that's done, we'll start on the next site and migrate the three hosts there.
Hyper-V isn't great and lacks some of the bells and whistles vSphere has, but the environment at work is a fairly simple setup and is almost entirely a Windows server shop. As such, Hyper-V covers the basics and gets the job done.
Since Broadcom decided to quadruple our licensing fees last
There's really no reason anymore (Score:3)
Proxmox is free, and I've yet to find a function that a homelab would need, which isn't available in Proxmox...and a plethora of functions in Proxmox that aren't available in VMWare. The ESXi interface is a bit more intuitive, I'll grant, and Proxmox similarly requires a bit more fiddling to get things like GPU Passthrough working optimally....but with Proxmox's ESXi import tool and Veeam support on the free versions, and with ESXi's next step up being thousands of dollars annually instead of $700 once, I can't see the use case.
Plus, anyone hitching their wagon to Broadcom after two years of horror stories is just asking for trouble.
Re: (Score:3)
Who really needs more than libvirt in a home lab? It does migrations and snapshots, integrates with zfs, yada yada. Not that I'm mad at Proxmox or anything, but the freer than free stuff does everything relevant to people whose setup can fit in one room.
It's a trap (Score:2)
The free version will last long enough to get users hooked, then a subscription will be required
Kinda like the drug dealers our parents warned us about
THANKS, Broadcom and other WANKERS (Score:2)
Any company that has screwed me and NOW says "Hey but here's this free product" can juat fuck the hell off.
Broadcom - goot job on buying VMwae and alienating ALL YOUR CUSTOMERS. Nobody is asking WHETHER to leave you, just WHEN and what it will cost. If you offered me $1M/yr to do business development for you [hangup sound].
Sony - remember George Hotz? I haven't bought a product with your name on it since.
Amazone Prime, Disney+, Hulu, Netflix, if I BUY A MOVIE do I own a copy or can you YOINK it any time
Nobody cares (Score:3)
>"VMware has resumed offering a free hypervisor."
Nobody cares anymore. They are now using XCP-NG/Xen Orchestra or Proxmox.
https://xcp-ng.org/blog/2022/1... [xcp-ng.org]
That ship has sailed (Score:2)
That ship has sailed. I've moved to Proxmox.
Wondering (Score:2)
VMware (Score:3)
Just about gone (Score:4, Informative)
long time vmware admin here (Score:2)
Please please please do something to revive this product. Broadcom is the devil.
I never liked ESXi (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I don't remember which version it was, 3.5? It was a long time ago anyway. I had an extremely basic setup on a nice chunky Dell server and I found that while everything worked, the management interface was REALLY clunky and bothersome.
So, ESXi 3.5 worked exclusively with a downloaded application that was installed on one's workstation...
It all behaved like an early web app framework where seemed like it was trying to make AJAX requests and pretend it was a real GUI where panels would just get stale data, fail to update automatically and a refresh would cure most ills.
Ahhh, around 5.x days they had a hybrid mode, where one could still use the installed management client, or the webUI...and yeah, the webUI definitely had some growing pains. The earliest iterations were in Flash, then they used some hackneyed AJAX implementation that was somehow worse...and we all ignored it and still used the client.
It took until 6.5 for the WebUI to actually be useful, which was good b
hahahaha no (Score:1)
Day late and a dollar short (Score:2)
Too late Broadcom!
I abandoned vmware workstation for libvirt/qemu at home.
Many other friends and colleagues who ran vmware abandoned it for Proxmox because of licensing cost.
Broadcom is still trying to strong-arm our biggest client into renewing with a 300% markup in license cost. The client is going to migrate to Azure and will do so as soon as the hardware support on our hosts expires next year.