Today, I caught wind of this notable nugget of newsworthy information — the free version of ESXi has been discontinued. Moreover, perpetual licensing has been discontinued in favor of a subscription-based model. This includes the discontinuance of special, lower-cost licensing for lab and non-production (i.e. training) usage.
This unfortunate announcement comes on the heels of Broadcom’s $69 billion purchase of VMware in November, 2023, followed by major layoffs just as the holiday season was firing up.
In short, VMware is no longer the VMware we have known and loved.
Needless to say, this changes my personal plans regarding becoming more of a VMware ninja. As noted last year, I procured a memory-laden server for the express purpose of learning VMware in my own little, controlled environment.
I have wasted no time in preparing for the inevitable, having already vacated all my Windows guests from my VMware environment. All that remains are some linux guests that are performing a variety of tasks. The plan is to back up what needs to be saved from those and then vacate them as well.
Once that has been accomplished, I have a few options – the first is to try out ProxMox (again, as I had tried it some time ago) and see how I like it. The other, more likely option, is to spin up an Unraid server and move the VMs to it. I already have a license sitting around for that and I’m already running Unraid on my primary server so there would be a minimal learning curve.
So…. stay tuned, and we’ll see where all this goes.
RIP VMware.
I hadn’t heard that, LAME
Yes, very lame.
Finished vacating it late this afternoon; this weekend I’m going to try to get ProxMox installed so I can play with it for a while. It’ll give me something to do since I’m on call. Yeah I know — Yikes.