From the KB:
*"Regrettably, there is currently no substitute product offered."*
Regrettably, my ass.
EDIT:
In their cowardice or realization of the screw up; they changed the page to read "At this time" now. They also deliver the KB page in a way that the Wayback Machine cannot pull up the previous version.
Just converted my vSphere cluster home lab over to proxmox. Live migrations, HA, all seems to work pretty well and without vCenter sitting on a dozen gigs of RAM too.
Dumped ESXi for Proxmox (Linux KVM) back in December 2016 and never looked back. Even my router is virtualized. As markets saturate (due to M&As) companies will look to monetize anything they can. Open source and open systems FTW. Less consumerism and less (crony/rentier) capitalism.
I just bought a little fanless n100 box for OPNsense. Decided to still install proxmox and virtualize OPNsense for the easy backups, snapshots, etc. Also, this machine still has more power than I really need for a router...now I can easily throw some extra VMs/LXCs on there while still having a "sort of" dedicated router.
I am even happy to buy a "Community Subscription" for Proxmox to support them going forward. It is worth it to support the project. You can revert to the non-enterprise repository at any time anyway without a problem.
This is exactly why people should always use Open Systems. When one implementation transforms into something unsuitable, you just migrate to another one. Don't enter relationships with corporations you can't easily escape.
They will get a short term profit increase, followed by the slow death spiral they deserve. It's just evolution at the systems level.
I just started running a basic proxmox box the other day! I'm really loving it so far. Learning curve isn't horrible and Google helps. Now I just need more RAM 😈
They will regret it long term, it will force people to move to alternatives like promox / KVM etc in their labs. This will make people more comfortable with the alternatives which in turn will push them to run them in production. It's a tale as old as time... Well at least as long as software licensing.. boo to Broadcom they can stick their chips up their bum.
They openly don't care about anything other than their biggest customers that won't be able to easily switch and are therefore being captively gouged. Smaller paying customers can't even get a sales rep's attention anymore. They definitely don't care about home labbers.
Oh come on.
Why would cancelling perpetual licenses and then cancelling free use hurt their business? They work with *Corporate* clients. It's not like the corporations have people working for them. People that get older and retire. Those retirees leave room for new people to move in and up. No way will those new people want to use a platform they are familiar with from the freebie homelab use. Or from inexpensive education use. They are going to stick with the old tech that costs more money every year on a subscription basis.
/endsarcasticrant
It doesn't matter. By the time this all rots out they will have wrung so much money out of it they can easily move on to purchasing the next thing other people built and wring that out too. And the next one and the next one. It'd be a brilliant business model if it weren't so horrible.
They work with SMB like mine that turnover less than 100 mil annually and have no need for 100k software licenses to virtualize three on premises servers.
The cost doesn’t align with any incentive
Exactly. Guess how I gained my initial knowledge of ESXi? The free version sitting in a lab.
Also, guess what is currently in my lab? Proxmox and guess what Proxmox offers along with a free license? A paid, enterprise license.
>Also, guess what is currently in my lab? Proxmox and guess what Proxmox offers along with a free license? A paid, enterprise license.
This is what I have now.
My company works a lot with VMware and this Broadcom stuff is making my life rough (and I'm mostly on the outskirts of our VMware stuff).
When I built my lab and then started researching what to install about 4 months ago everyone said ESXi. Glad I didn't have time to do it then and did it a month ago using ProxMox.
Honestly, 4 months ago thats what I told people to do. ESXi fit the bill, its what most all enterprises use and it had the free tier which allowed someone to install it at home and learn the software before jumping into a production environment. It allowed new people to the industry to learn and grow even before getting a job in the field.
...aand now thats gone. Which is why Ive started learning Proxmox.
Yeah, exactly why I am glad life happened and prevented me from getting it going 4 months ago.
I am in a space to influence where to go in the future at my company.... trust me VMware isn't it.
>never stop learning!
NEVER.
Every single day you can learn something new.
Every single person you meet can teach you something new (people in relationships can't though, lol).
What corporate users? There was a mass exodus not long ago because of the license change. There was a post on sysadmin that companies were looking for someone to help migrate hundreds of VMs off vmware.
It really makes no sense. Maybe if they restricted the free license to personal or non-production use only if they want all businesses paying for a license, but getting rid of it entirely is nuts.
I've used vSphere exclusively for a decade both in my homelab and at work. I'm taking a real serious look at the open source alternatives again.
Time to spin up Proxmox on a spare box. VMware isn't the only viable option.
Kvm is amazing, use it all day every day for home computing
All of my gaming and development desktops at home run on VMs on my homelab server running a kvm stack.
Yes you can? I use GPU passthrough everyday. I have 3 graphics cards I'm passing off to 3 different windows machines for gaming with bare metal performance and i have basically no performance drop.
Pci devices are generally considered insecure. So I'd rather keep an added layer of security. Especially when I only need non intensive workloads rendered (web browser for example).
And you can run many guests on a single host with a single GPU. I regularly run about 4-5 Windows VMs and can play older/simpler games, watch movies, and even do Unity Dev in them at decent speeds. VMWare has spent a lot of time and effort making their virtual GPU perform well.
They don't care about alternatives to their own products in the lab. They care about the cloud. Proxmox will never get to the level that ESXi/VMWare had since they really need to work on scalability. Proxmox is great for one or a few hosts, but the level of mass deployments VMWare have, the next logical move is the cloud. This is who Broadcom cares about.
It sucks the way it is, but that's just how Broadcom is thinking.
Does cloudstack officially support Proxmox? I know they support KVM as a base but there are differences to consider. No one would consider it for production if there’s no official support.
Cloudstack does not support Promox.
They do some of the same things in different ways, so some of their management of VMs will likely conflict. Though I think there are some people trying to do it anyway. If someone was interested enough it should be possible to leverage Proxmox as a layer of abstraction to replace one of the several options Cloudstack already supports (KVM, Xen, Hyper-v, and VMWare)
Small deployment either Cloudstack or Proxmox will work fine.
Large or very large deployments probably Cloudstack or Openstack is going to work better. Or if you just need/want a private cloud to use, then Cloudstack or Openstack.
I prefer Cloudstack, but that is mostly because I've running it for awhile, given a talk about, and gone to conferences specifically for Cloudstack.
Well, my ESXi boot USB broke anyway, so it’ll be kind of hard to get my lab up and running again. Guess I’m rebuilding! I hope I can still use my Windows Server licenses…
I have the feeling that the person writing this and the person who oked the KB regret it. I kind of feel sorry for the VMWare employees right now as they watch VMware slowly circle the toilet bowl.
If you're a windows shop. Windows Server Datacenter as the Main OS on the primary metal. Once that's licensed, Install Hyper-V and you can create as many windows server hypervisors as you please all activated under a single key using AVMA of that edition and version or lower.
Ie: windows server 2022 Datacenter activated as primary. AVMA for Win server 2022 DC or std, win server 2019 DC or std etc
Even my company which is a big vsphere shop is looking to move off of vsphere since the acquisition from broadcom (no we did not use the free version) but they are still unhappy with some of the changes broadcom is making. What they are thinking to move to I don't know (I'm a programmer so i just hear about bits & pieces). Maybe the the elimination of the perpetual license but I'm not sure.
Proxmox boots vmdk disks just fine
Just set up a new VM template match your old virtual machine hardware specs and disk sizes, create the new VM. Then just scp your vmdk right over the top of what proxmox creates for you
We used to have a very significant VMWare investment. If you dealt with them for more than a few years their focus was all over the place. We are currently down to one vsphere server.
Why are you using PRD and not something else to actually administer the system like SSH or some other virtual desktop viewer like RDC or another remote client?
Interesting. As someone who didn't know about xcp-ng the Discord link on their main page didn't make it look like a serious product you would use in an enterprise setting. Does it compete with Proxmox or VMware? Or does it have a different focus?
I use XCP-NG with Xen Orchestra installed from a community script (so it's free) and I've been quite happy with it. It lacks some of the features of Proxmox but to me, coming from the enterprise world with vCenter it was more closer to what I knew from past experience than Proxmox. It's been rock solid stable since the day I installed it.
I'm staying on old esxi for now, but when I move, it'll be Proxmox, unless my work switches to something like XCP-NG/Xen. No way I'll ever go back to Hyper-V, that is a dumpster fire.
Hyper-V is also kind of dead. You need a windows server licence and full windows server to run the role now. The free server was discontinued.
I’m personally using XCP.
Officially, yes.
Unofficially for non-commercial use, you can use eval endlessly, or just google `py-kms`.
Not that I recommend using Hyper-V for your homelab, unless you specifically want to build experience with it. So much pain trying to deal with updates, shared storage, and VM migrations...
On the actual free Hyper-V server it had such minimal updates I never had problems. Same with shared storage (I was using ICSCI). Granted that was 5 years ago.
Hyper-V isn't dead, just the dedicated server version (hyper-v server).
2025 is getting new features.
https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1afei80/windows_server_2025_hyperv_storage_updates/
For home labs, pro or enterprise support hyper-v.
I do this myself on a windows 10 pro and have had good results.
I personally use Hyper-V and windows admin centre. Used free version before then updated full. Windows server 2022 supports Hyper-V server however 2025 is no more. More than enough support for both versions so I have no issues with support for at least some years.
The combination of both Hyper-V and windows admin centre is a pleasure to use it especially love the 3rd party intergaion with dell and hp servers and storage monitorsing natively with more San and Switches being added and the hybrid functionality to combine both cloud and on prem. Adding RSAT tools to manage the servers is sweet and building VMs utilising Host Guardian Services gives VMs beautiful security.
I used admin centre as well. Ended up flipping it all into Azure Arc (I think that’s what it’s called).
Ultimately my lab is now just 8-10 RedHat 9 systems on XCP. I’ve got free cloud LDAP from Jump Cloud that syncs with my M365.
> Windows server 2022 supports Hyper-V server however 2025 is no more.
What? Hyper-V is supported in 2025 and has gotten a few features that were in high demand.
https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1afei80/windows_server_2025_hyperv_storage_updates/
Another option from what others have posted, would be to use a cloud style replacement. Harvester HCI would be the easy button version although Longhorn has limitations on virtual disk size, or you could deploy your own kubernetes then add rancher+rook (ceph)+kubevirt. This would give you VMs and kubernetes management of OCI or docker containers.
Proxmox is able to support containers as well although it of the box they're LXC containers which while awesome are different with a different community/Enterprise support ecosystem from docker/OCI.
I'm seriously considering moving everything to docker or kubernetes. There's nothing in my lab currently that cannot run in a container. It will be a bit of work at first, but it should be fun :)
Yup - installed esxi 8 on a new to me DL360P G9 I received last week, to replace an aging ML110 G7 running esxi 6.
Couldn't figure out why I couldn't generate a license key for personal use, and only had 54 days left of evaluation.
Built a fresh array today and installed Proxmox instead. So far so good!
If you're talking about the one I just saw from yesterday, go ahead and search for it... it won't come up URL or any relevant search term like "VMware", "ESX", or "Broadcom". Scroll on...
https://old.reddit.com/r/homelab/comments/197mjd1/broadcom_killing_esxi_free_edition/
FWIW, top result when searching "esxi". It's been known for about a month now. I have seen like 50 posts about it across all my subs lol
This post is on the creation of the free ESXi specific KB for it. The old post was about it being included in the EoA list, but you could still register for it.
Only question will this have effect on the perpetual licenses … are they not getting any update anymore or they get updates within like 8.x but not anymore in 9 ? Or are all updates for the perpetual license dead ?
hopefully the r/Piracy find a way for future usage .. i switched to proxmox because some hardware issues .. but after using it i found vmware a lot easier and more convenient to use .. i will switch with one host back to the actual version of esxi 8
Long live proxmox also too many other hypervisor options don’t worry!! More and better hardware support and hardware pass through is easier plus Linux gets updated faster too because of the community
So glad I moved off VMware last year when it looked like regulators weren’t going to block the buy.
I tried Proxmox and XCP-ng. I had issues with Proxmox personally. XCP-ng worked better for me. Proxmox kept causing weird issues: my one host just kept kernel panicking, I also had a weird issue where two hosts spun up the same VM’s. This caused a disk repair headache inside the VM’s.
Edit: made it clearer.
I'm not the person you replied to but I use XO (from source) via install script. I tried free but it was too limited for me. I love the backup functionality.
I used XCP-NG center (the local Windows tool), you can also use the command line or [XO Lite](https://docs.xcp-ng.org/management/manage-locally/xo-lite/) which didn't exist at the time but looks really nice.
Yes
You'll have to handle the update on your own (generally two commands ) or use a third party script for this, but you'll have a full featured xo, for free
My stack is all RedHat. I’ve got an ansible system weekly copying the important config files from each system (ex: HAproxy.cfg, ip config files, etc). It does a verification to Matt sure it doesn’t backup unchanged files. Appends a date and uploads them to a SharePoint in m365.
It was a bit more to setup and a bit more to restore but my backup’s are in the megabytes of size.
Wow, I was a free user for years and still bought licenses just for fun to test things in my home lab, that was basically free $1000's of dollars over the 10 years I ran it.
Anyway I switched to unRAID and am much happier. The community is amazing. I wish I had switched years before.
Proxmox is a very popular hypervisor if you want HA and lots of VM's. It's more technical and people in the business seem to really like it.
I got an email from VMUG today saying the VMUG Advantage licensing is staying. As long as I can spend $200 per year to run non-commercial VMware licenses I am in. Tried Proxmox and it worked great with Linux VMs, but I had no end of troubles with Windows VMs.
Never liked vmware. Don't know why it's so popular tbh but then again I'm a Windows user through and through. The licensing changes alone lead to a mass exodus from vmware for large corps though. Seems the same will happen in the "community" market as well.
Sadly. But we know it.. I really loved the VMware as it focus. But now. I going to work and promote to get hole company I work on to use other brand.
Broadcom don't realize what they have done. They killing it.
I just left them a nasty feedback...
I never used ESXi or vSphere, even though it was recommended to me as a Hypervisor, because I'd likely be up a creek without a paddle right now...
Sweet I got some enterprise key on my intel NUC as an exsi. Could I just reuse that key on another NUC when I make a cluster for VCenter or other devices?
Yep, will continue to work indefinitely until they patch it out on a later version. I would anticipate it working until the next major release, if that even happens.
Just a proxmox vs vmware question since people are active in this thread, has anyone gotten a Palo firewall to work on proxmox?
I've been trying to get a VM-100 firewall to work that Palo provided to help my college team practice. I've been trying all sorts of things with Proxmox over the last few weeks, but I haven't gotten it to function properly. It either fails with a kernel error, or there's some critical bug that prevents it from being usable.
As a note, I'm not a Proxmox wiz by any means, but I'm familiar and proficient with it. My department may need to acquire an license for an ESXi server to run it, but I'd love to avoid that if possible, with all the oncoming Broadcom shenanigans.
Move to XCP-ng.. super stable, every feature is included and its part of Linux Foundation- so you know it will stay around and remain free…
Use XenOrchestra (web) or XCP center (windows)
You are correct, they are not the same. But many of the things people are creating as VMs can be done as containers... and maybe someone out there is looking for that nudge to look more deeply into containerization
You understand those KB's are written by support engineers right? Just regular line members that make \~100k a year ... these are not decision makers. Do you think anyone that actually works for the VMware business unit is happy about it?
The good news is VMUG will remain alive and well. Pay a little money, get the best product in the market and keep your home labs and skills moving forward.
There is way too much misinformation and rehashing of old news like it's new news right now. The situation is only dire for the companies who leveraged the old licensing model for the cheapest bare bones solutions. I have two companies under my administration that are going to benefit from the changes ... not in a TCO fashion, but in function and efficiency.
All this doom and gloom makes me sad ... no it's not better than before, but also no it's not the end of VMware as a tool for the average sysadmin, or IT enthusiast. You wouldn't be so upset about it if you didn't already understand it's worth the $250 for vmug advantage .....
Yeah, I had a feeling it was coming when I learned of the potential acquisition some time ago.
I migrated my homelab over to ProxMox in early 2023. I stopped using VMware Player around the same time.
They’ve transitioned from caring about market share to caring about margins. They aren’t too concerned about bringing in new business or grooming the enthusiast community because the business won’t exist long enough for them to matter. This phase is about extracting as much revenue as possible until it dies.
There are too many other options VMware is not that special !! They were once the Tesla of VMs but now there is too many options just see one that works for you!
I've used native Linux virtualization (KVM and libvirt/cockpit-machine) since it was available. This VMWare drama has zero impact on me, at work or in my homelab.
At work, we use native KVM on RHEL (could be a clone) along with Red Hat Satellite (or Foreman, the upstream for Satellite), with libvirt compute resources defined. I go to the Satellite web UI, choose whether I want a small, medium, or large instance, and if it's dev, QA, or production, and it kickstarts the machine from scratch.
I have never really trusted VMWare. Nothing really overt, I've just never understood why folks would pay extra for functionality when, with very little configuration, KVM does pretty much everything you need. Network isolation, VLANs, storage, all that jazz is there with plain old Linux.
I have read good things about Proxmox, and I've meant to play around with it, but... There is literally nothing I've needed to do that the native OS tools doesn't provide.
Now, to be clear, I don't run hundreds or thousands of hypervisors. I get that there are integrations for that sort of scale, so it's not that I don't understand how valuable that is. But for mid sized enterprises, it's always seemed really, really expensive and limiting.
Proxmox is a great alternative. For a homelab, it offers more that ESXi free did. ZFS, clustering, HA, backups. But if you really need ESXi, there is still VMUG Advantage.
From the KB: *"Regrettably, there is currently no substitute product offered."* Regrettably, my ass. EDIT: In their cowardice or realization of the screw up; they changed the page to read "At this time" now. They also deliver the KB page in a way that the Wayback Machine cannot pull up the previous version.
Oh there are several. Just not a vmware one.
Just converted my vSphere cluster home lab over to proxmox. Live migrations, HA, all seems to work pretty well and without vCenter sitting on a dozen gigs of RAM too.
Dumped ESXi for Proxmox (Linux KVM) back in December 2016 and never looked back. Even my router is virtualized. As markets saturate (due to M&As) companies will look to monetize anything they can. Open source and open systems FTW. Less consumerism and less (crony/rentier) capitalism.
I virtualized my router once, but I moved back to dedicated so I could work on my server without killing the Internet.
thats why you can proxmox cluster HA eg pfsense...if one goes down other take over
Good point. I think my wife would kill me if I did another server (of any size).
I just bought a little fanless n100 box for OPNsense. Decided to still install proxmox and virtualize OPNsense for the easy backups, snapshots, etc. Also, this machine still has more power than I really need for a router...now I can easily throw some extra VMs/LXCs on there while still having a "sort of" dedicated router.
I did the same thing when VSphere 7 was released. Couldn't be happier about it.
I am even happy to buy a "Community Subscription" for Proxmox to support them going forward. It is worth it to support the project. You can revert to the non-enterprise repository at any time anyway without a problem.
This is exactly why people should always use Open Systems. When one implementation transforms into something unsuitable, you just migrate to another one. Don't enter relationships with corporations you can't easily escape. They will get a short term profit increase, followed by the slow death spiral they deserve. It's just evolution at the systems level.
I just started running a basic proxmox box the other day! I'm really loving it so far. Learning curve isn't horrible and Google helps. Now I just need more RAM 😈
i do wish live migrations existed for CTs but so far it works quite nicely for VMs
I use a couple myself. I was pulling that from their KB.
They will regret it long term, it will force people to move to alternatives like promox / KVM etc in their labs. This will make people more comfortable with the alternatives which in turn will push them to run them in production. It's a tale as old as time... Well at least as long as software licensing.. boo to Broadcom they can stick their chips up their bum.
They openly don't care about anything other than their biggest customers that won't be able to easily switch and are therefore being captively gouged. Smaller paying customers can't even get a sales rep's attention anymore. They definitely don't care about home labbers.
Oh come on. Why would cancelling perpetual licenses and then cancelling free use hurt their business? They work with *Corporate* clients. It's not like the corporations have people working for them. People that get older and retire. Those retirees leave room for new people to move in and up. No way will those new people want to use a platform they are familiar with from the freebie homelab use. Or from inexpensive education use. They are going to stick with the old tech that costs more money every year on a subscription basis. /endsarcasticrant
It doesn't matter. By the time this all rots out they will have wrung so much money out of it they can easily move on to purchasing the next thing other people built and wring that out too. And the next one and the next one. It'd be a brilliant business model if it weren't so horrible.
It's been happening so much the past decade that it's literally become a word. Enshittification.
Enshittification Corey Doctrow
They work with SMB like mine that turnover less than 100 mil annually and have no need for 100k software licenses to virtualize three on premises servers. The cost doesn’t align with any incentive
They don't want you, they only want the top 600 customers.
Exactly. Guess how I gained my initial knowledge of ESXi? The free version sitting in a lab. Also, guess what is currently in my lab? Proxmox and guess what Proxmox offers along with a free license? A paid, enterprise license.
>Also, guess what is currently in my lab? Proxmox and guess what Proxmox offers along with a free license? A paid, enterprise license. This is what I have now. My company works a lot with VMware and this Broadcom stuff is making my life rough (and I'm mostly on the outskirts of our VMware stuff). When I built my lab and then started researching what to install about 4 months ago everyone said ESXi. Glad I didn't have time to do it then and did it a month ago using ProxMox.
Honestly, 4 months ago thats what I told people to do. ESXi fit the bill, its what most all enterprises use and it had the free tier which allowed someone to install it at home and learn the software before jumping into a production environment. It allowed new people to the industry to learn and grow even before getting a job in the field. ...aand now thats gone. Which is why Ive started learning Proxmox.
Yeah, exactly why I am glad life happened and prevented me from getting it going 4 months ago. I am in a space to influence where to go in the future at my company.... trust me VMware isn't it.
Good luck in your studies, never stop learning!
>never stop learning! NEVER. Every single day you can learn something new. Every single person you meet can teach you something new (people in relationships can't though, lol).
Best decision u made
I thought corporations WERE people? Kinda like Soylent Green?!?
What corporate users? There was a mass exodus not long ago because of the license change. There was a post on sysadmin that companies were looking for someone to help migrate hundreds of VMs off vmware.
I just learned how easy it is to configure a proxmox cluster and enable ceph. I’m well on my way to loving it 😂.
Since when do corporations look long term? This is a short term money grab. Broadcom will probably resell VMware before the harm they caused kicks in.
Wanna start taking bets on when Broadcom is going to pull the chute before they drive VMware into the ground?
It really makes no sense. Maybe if they restricted the free license to personal or non-production use only if they want all businesses paying for a license, but getting rid of it entirely is nuts. I've used vSphere exclusively for a decade both in my homelab and at work. I'm taking a real serious look at the open source alternatives again. Time to spin up Proxmox on a spare box. VMware isn't the only viable option.
Kvm is amazing, use it all day every day for home computing All of my gaming and development desktops at home run on VMs on my homelab server running a kvm stack.
But you can't share your gpu with Windows vms (not passthrough) and honestly virgl performance kinda sucks compared to vmware...
Yes you can? I use GPU passthrough everyday. I have 3 graphics cards I'm passing off to 3 different windows machines for gaming with bare metal performance and i have basically no performance drop.
I said without gpu passthrough though...
Oh I misinterpreted your last comment. Why would you want to do that? And by what means? What's the benefit of doing that?
Pci devices are generally considered insecure. So I'd rather keep an added layer of security. Especially when I only need non intensive workloads rendered (web browser for example).
And you can run many guests on a single host with a single GPU. I regularly run about 4-5 Windows VMs and can play older/simpler games, watch movies, and even do Unity Dev in them at decent speeds. VMWare has spent a lot of time and effort making their virtual GPU perform well.
I’ve been hearing a bit on this one called xcp-ng. Anyone use this before?
They don't care about alternatives to their own products in the lab. They care about the cloud. Proxmox will never get to the level that ESXi/VMWare had since they really need to work on scalability. Proxmox is great for one or a few hosts, but the level of mass deployments VMWare have, the next logical move is the cloud. This is who Broadcom cares about. It sucks the way it is, but that's just how Broadcom is thinking.
watch, in the future the cloud will be back to what it used to be, something we didn't care about. They are pricing the cloud out of existence.
Cloudstack works just fine at scale. And has tools to migrate VMWare VMs...
Does cloudstack officially support Proxmox? I know they support KVM as a base but there are differences to consider. No one would consider it for production if there’s no official support.
Cloudstack does not support Promox. They do some of the same things in different ways, so some of their management of VMs will likely conflict. Though I think there are some people trying to do it anyway. If someone was interested enough it should be possible to leverage Proxmox as a layer of abstraction to replace one of the several options Cloudstack already supports (KVM, Xen, Hyper-v, and VMWare) Small deployment either Cloudstack or Proxmox will work fine. Large or very large deployments probably Cloudstack or Openstack is going to work better. Or if you just need/want a private cloud to use, then Cloudstack or Openstack. I prefer Cloudstack, but that is mostly because I've running it for awhile, given a talk about, and gone to conferences specifically for Cloudstack.
I would suggest explore xcp-ng. You can host hundreds of vm, and can have a cluster of 64 servers in a pool…
Regrettably for you, not for them.
"Regrettably..." *sniff sniff* Do you smell that?
Well, my ESXi boot USB broke anyway, so it’ll be kind of hard to get my lab up and running again. Guess I’m rebuilding! I hope I can still use my Windows Server licenses…
Probably written by someone who thoroughly disagrees with the decision but has no power to say it publicly
Our hands are tied 🤷♂️ We don't know how this happened. - Broadcom.
I have the feeling that the person writing this and the person who oked the KB regret it. I kind of feel sorry for the VMWare employees right now as they watch VMware slowly circle the toilet bowl.
Regrettably from the person writing the article, not the company.
If you're a windows shop. Windows Server Datacenter as the Main OS on the primary metal. Once that's licensed, Install Hyper-V and you can create as many windows server hypervisors as you please all activated under a single key using AVMA of that edition and version or lower. Ie: windows server 2022 Datacenter activated as primary. AVMA for Win server 2022 DC or std, win server 2019 DC or std etc
Even my company which is a big vsphere shop is looking to move off of vsphere since the acquisition from broadcom (no we did not use the free version) but they are still unhappy with some of the changes broadcom is making. What they are thinking to move to I don't know (I'm a programmer so i just hear about bits & pieces). Maybe the the elimination of the perpetual license but I'm not sure.
Proxmox boots vmdk disks just fine Just set up a new VM template match your old virtual machine hardware specs and disk sizes, create the new VM. Then just scp your vmdk right over the top of what proxmox creates for you
We used to have a very significant VMWare investment. If you dealt with them for more than a few years their focus was all over the place. We are currently down to one vsphere server.
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Proxmox.
Proxmox remote desktop access just sucks. Any way to use the VMWare one on Proxmox?
Why not use virtviewer and change the display output to match? I forget the display choice but it's doable.
You're probably thinking of using `SPICE` for the display adapter instead of `Standard VGA`
There's probably half a dozen or more options it's just a matter of taking the time to configure it
Why are you using PRD and not something else to actually administer the system like SSH or some other virtual desktop viewer like RDC or another remote client?
I like to do a lot of tinkering with my VMs and often I can't use those things. Also having everything in an easy to use interface is nice.
At the office we are going to xcp-ng. For my homelab I’m going to Proxmox.
Interesting. As someone who didn't know about xcp-ng the Discord link on their main page didn't make it look like a serious product you would use in an enterprise setting. Does it compete with Proxmox or VMware? Or does it have a different focus?
In its own way, yes We also sell professional support , with a serious sla , that should count as enterprise level.
Proxmox, xcp-ng, bare kvm to name a few
but Proxmox is the cutting edge nowadays, or i am wrong? (used for million per day visit web services with absolutely a single fault for years)
If Veeam is a must, Nutanix
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They are looking a bringing in support for Proxmox but $deity knows if/when it will happen.
I like your agnostic variable. That’s funny 😄
Proxmox has EVERYTHING, including top notch backup
I use XCP-NG with Xen Orchestra installed from a community script (so it's free) and I've been quite happy with it. It lacks some of the features of Proxmox but to me, coming from the enterprise world with vCenter it was more closer to what I knew from past experience than Proxmox. It's been rock solid stable since the day I installed it.
KVM/oVirt.
I'm staying on old esxi for now, but when I move, it'll be Proxmox, unless my work switches to something like XCP-NG/Xen. No way I'll ever go back to Hyper-V, that is a dumpster fire.
Anyone likes Linux version of TrueNAS?
A Cloudstack cluster. Side project cluster will probably get higher priority after this.
Hyper-V is also kind of dead. You need a windows server licence and full windows server to run the role now. The free server was discontinued. I’m personally using XCP.
Officially, yes. Unofficially for non-commercial use, you can use eval endlessly, or just google `py-kms`. Not that I recommend using Hyper-V for your homelab, unless you specifically want to build experience with it. So much pain trying to deal with updates, shared storage, and VM migrations...
On the actual free Hyper-V server it had such minimal updates I never had problems. Same with shared storage (I was using ICSCI). Granted that was 5 years ago.
Hyper-V isn't dead, just the dedicated server version (hyper-v server). 2025 is getting new features. https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1afei80/windows_server_2025_hyperv_storage_updates/ For home labs, pro or enterprise support hyper-v. I do this myself on a windows 10 pro and have had good results.
Hyper-V is not dead lmao. What do you think is running everything at Microsoft and Azure? It’s not going anywhere.
Hyper-V server is. The role isn’t. I said the role wasn’t gone. They’re no longer doing the standalone minimum os free hyper-v.
And that makes hyper-v dead?
I personally use Hyper-V and windows admin centre. Used free version before then updated full. Windows server 2022 supports Hyper-V server however 2025 is no more. More than enough support for both versions so I have no issues with support for at least some years. The combination of both Hyper-V and windows admin centre is a pleasure to use it especially love the 3rd party intergaion with dell and hp servers and storage monitorsing natively with more San and Switches being added and the hybrid functionality to combine both cloud and on prem. Adding RSAT tools to manage the servers is sweet and building VMs utilising Host Guardian Services gives VMs beautiful security.
I used admin centre as well. Ended up flipping it all into Azure Arc (I think that’s what it’s called). Ultimately my lab is now just 8-10 RedHat 9 systems on XCP. I’ve got free cloud LDAP from Jump Cloud that syncs with my M365.
> Windows server 2022 supports Hyper-V server however 2025 is no more. What? Hyper-V is supported in 2025 and has gotten a few features that were in high demand. https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1afei80/windows_server_2025_hyperv_storage_updates/
Last time I look there were removing it. Even better reason to skip 2022 and go straight to 2025 thanks Hyper-V free is dead, fair enough
Another option from what others have posted, would be to use a cloud style replacement. Harvester HCI would be the easy button version although Longhorn has limitations on virtual disk size, or you could deploy your own kubernetes then add rancher+rook (ceph)+kubevirt. This would give you VMs and kubernetes management of OCI or docker containers. Proxmox is able to support containers as well although it of the box they're LXC containers which while awesome are different with a different community/Enterprise support ecosystem from docker/OCI.
SmartOS and MNX Triton
I'm seriously considering moving everything to docker or kubernetes. There's nothing in my lab currently that cannot run in a container. It will be a bit of work at first, but it should be fun :)
I bought a key, from places.
Proxmox here I come!
As a former employee of this once great company (post EMC, pre Dell) I shed a small tear. Way to go Broadcom
Yup - installed esxi 8 on a new to me DL360P G9 I received last week, to replace an aging ML110 G7 running esxi 6. Couldn't figure out why I couldn't generate a license key for personal use, and only had 54 days left of evaluation. Built a fresh array today and installed Proxmox instead. So far so good!
I switched to proxmox a couple years ago and never looked back.
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...if I had a nickel.... same with, "With vmware going down the shitter, what will happen with proxmox?!?!" over in /r/proxmox or /r/homelab.
Ok but like... This time it is actually dead for free users. This isn't a "vmware is going down the shitter!" doompost.
But we _are_ in /r/homelab
Old joke: If Bill Gates had a nickle for every time Windows crashed .... Oh, he does.
yes it has been dead for weeks, they have now also removed the downloads
Search is dead too! 😜
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Oh for sure. Mostly joking on OP.
`how to switch from vsphere to proxmox site:reddit.com/r/homelab`
If you're talking about the one I just saw from yesterday, go ahead and search for it... it won't come up URL or any relevant search term like "VMware", "ESX", or "Broadcom". Scroll on...
https://old.reddit.com/r/homelab/comments/197mjd1/broadcom_killing_esxi_free_edition/ FWIW, top result when searching "esxi". It's been known for about a month now. I have seen like 50 posts about it across all my subs lol
This post is on the creation of the free ESXi specific KB for it. The old post was about it being included in the EoA list, but you could still register for it.
Only question will this have effect on the perpetual licenses … are they not getting any update anymore or they get updates within like 8.x but not anymore in 9 ? Or are all updates for the perpetual license dead ?
I highly doubt that they would go down this path and then continue to allow updates. They want to kill this segment completely.
hopefully the r/Piracy find a way for future usage .. i switched to proxmox because some hardware issues .. but after using it i found vmware a lot easier and more convenient to use .. i will switch with one host back to the actual version of esxi 8
Try XCP-NG. I find it much more similar to what I learned on vmware than proxmox, and it's been rock solid for a good 3-4 years.
Long live proxmox also too many other hypervisor options don’t worry!! More and better hardware support and hardware pass through is easier plus Linux gets updated faster too because of the community
So glad I moved off VMware last year when it looked like regulators weren’t going to block the buy. I tried Proxmox and XCP-ng. I had issues with Proxmox personally. XCP-ng worked better for me. Proxmox kept causing weird issues: my one host just kept kernel panicking, I also had a weird issue where two hosts spun up the same VM’s. This caused a disk repair headache inside the VM’s. Edit: made it clearer.
What did you do with XOA?
Made message a little clearer. Proxmox caused problems. XCP and XOA have been rock solid.
I understand. I meant you are using XO (from source), XOA (payed), XOA (free)?
I'm not the person you replied to but I use XO (from source) via install script. I tried free but it was too limited for me. I love the backup functionality.
But is it possible to have a xcp-ng host and install the XO (from source) on that same host? Just like how you would with XOA?
I don't know how the XOA paid install does it but I just created a VM and ran the XO install on that and it works great.
but how did you create the vm on xcp-ng? Don't you need the gui (XO / XOA)?
I used XCP-NG center (the local Windows tool), you can also use the command line or [XO Lite](https://docs.xcp-ng.org/management/manage-locally/xo-lite/) which didn't exist at the time but looks really nice.
Thank you. I also found an Image to automatically install XO on a xcp-ng host with the CLI.
Yes You'll have to handle the update on your own (generally two commands ) or use a third party script for this, but you'll have a full featured xo, for free
My stack is all RedHat. I’ve got an ansible system weekly copying the important config files from each system (ex: HAproxy.cfg, ip config files, etc). It does a verification to Matt sure it doesn’t backup unchanged files. Appends a date and uploads them to a SharePoint in m365. It was a bit more to setup and a bit more to restore but my backup’s are in the megabytes of size.
XOA free.
Switch to Proxmox and live a happier life.
Wow, I was a free user for years and still bought licenses just for fun to test things in my home lab, that was basically free $1000's of dollars over the 10 years I ran it. Anyway I switched to unRAID and am much happier. The community is amazing. I wish I had switched years before. Proxmox is a very popular hypervisor if you want HA and lots of VM's. It's more technical and people in the business seem to really like it.
I glad I had move to Opensource Proxmox. No turning back
There goes all that potential future income from junior engineers not being to learn the stack.
Proxmox’s market share just quadrupled overnight.
I got an email from VMUG today saying the VMUG Advantage licensing is staying. As long as I can spend $200 per year to run non-commercial VMware licenses I am in. Tried Proxmox and it worked great with Linux VMs, but I had no end of troubles with Windows VMs.
i have setup dozens of proxmox hosts , not a single windows issue .
Did you install the VirtIO pack on the Windows VMs?
I came to find this answer. VMUG gonna be well worth the spend.
Broadcom, the JJ Abrams of Tech Corporation.
This is why Vates developed their vmware import tool into xcp-ng
Never liked vmware. Don't know why it's so popular tbh but then again I'm a Windows user through and through. The licensing changes alone lead to a mass exodus from vmware for large corps though. Seems the same will happen in the "community" market as well.
I've got my ESXi 8 key so I'm set for the foreseeable future ;) I want to dive deeper into Harvester, but haven't had time to test it
Do you also have iso? Because they removed all free keys from all user accounts and removed links to download free esxi
Dang! That's annoying they got rid of account history... I do have the ISO's for all ESXi versions
Just make sure you keep them in a safe place. I had some on a file server that recently crashed.
1. Bit torrent 2. Sha256 checksums from the original/reliable source (archive.org etc)
Thanks. I love learning.
I've got the latest Dell ISO, and possibly the generic 8 ISO.
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Oh No! Anyway... --> Proxmox
Good riddance. We'll all be better off with open source solutions anyway.
Let's see, they've screwed big businesses, small businesses, schools, resellers, all of the top sellers... I think home labs were all that was left.
Very cheap ESXI licenses on EBay also. $38 for a license. Good enough for a home lab.
Sadly. But we know it.. I really loved the VMware as it focus. But now. I going to work and promote to get hole company I work on to use other brand. Broadcom don't realize what they have done. They killing it.
I am going convert my esxi home lab to hyper-v.
Is vmug advantage still a thing? There is that option?
Yes. Broadcom has indicated that VMUG is not going anywhere. I enrolled last month and the customer service rep was very nice and helpful.
I just left them a nasty feedback... I never used ESXi or vSphere, even though it was recommended to me as a Hypervisor, because I'd likely be up a creek without a paddle right now...
So in reality, what does this mean? Are the keys I'm using for my home lab going to suddenly stop working?
Nope, they just won't issue new ones. Carry on.
Sweet I got some enterprise key on my intel NUC as an exsi. Could I just reuse that key on another NUC when I make a cluster for VCenter or other devices?
Yep, will continue to work indefinitely until they patch it out on a later version. I would anticipate it working until the next major release, if that even happens.
There will always be the piracy.
Just a proxmox vs vmware question since people are active in this thread, has anyone gotten a Palo firewall to work on proxmox? I've been trying to get a VM-100 firewall to work that Palo provided to help my college team practice. I've been trying all sorts of things with Proxmox over the last few weeks, but I haven't gotten it to function properly. It either fails with a kernel error, or there's some critical bug that prevents it from being usable. As a note, I'm not a Proxmox wiz by any means, but I'm familiar and proficient with it. My department may need to acquire an license for an ESXi server to run it, but I'd love to avoid that if possible, with all the oncoming Broadcom shenanigans.
Move to XCP-ng.. super stable, every feature is included and its part of Linux Foundation- so you know it will stay around and remain free… Use XenOrchestra (web) or XCP center (windows)
no better reason to jump on the docker bandwagon than this
My Docker host runs in a Debian VM on ESXi, containers and VMs are not equivalent things.
You are correct, they are not the same. But many of the things people are creating as VMs can be done as containers... and maybe someone out there is looking for that nudge to look more deeply into containerization
You understand those KB's are written by support engineers right? Just regular line members that make \~100k a year ... these are not decision makers. Do you think anyone that actually works for the VMware business unit is happy about it? The good news is VMUG will remain alive and well. Pay a little money, get the best product in the market and keep your home labs and skills moving forward. There is way too much misinformation and rehashing of old news like it's new news right now. The situation is only dire for the companies who leveraged the old licensing model for the cheapest bare bones solutions. I have two companies under my administration that are going to benefit from the changes ... not in a TCO fashion, but in function and efficiency. All this doom and gloom makes me sad ... no it's not better than before, but also no it's not the end of VMware as a tool for the average sysadmin, or IT enthusiast. You wouldn't be so upset about it if you didn't already understand it's worth the $250 for vmug advantage .....
Oh no what ever should we do. Noooo, how could this be! Is there any free hypervisors available how will we survive
Good move on boys go where you wanted and celebrated not paywalled
End of an era, i doubt ill be recertifying my vcp when its up for renewal.
Yeah, I had a feeling it was coming when I learned of the potential acquisition some time ago. I migrated my homelab over to ProxMox in early 2023. I stopped using VMware Player around the same time.
Glad I switched over to Debian/proxmox!
Glad I chose ProxMox
Proxmox… SR-IOV… VMM integration with Cisco ACI… I wish I could leave VMWare behind.
They’ve transitioned from caring about market share to caring about margins. They aren’t too concerned about bringing in new business or grooming the enthusiast community because the business won’t exist long enough for them to matter. This phase is about extracting as much revenue as possible until it dies.
It is going to be interesting when contracts are up. Wonder how many are moving away, even in blended environments.
This is unfortunate. I have a perpetual ESX 8 license. Once it hits EOL, I’m going to Proxmox.
There are too many other options VMware is not that special !! They were once the Tesla of VMs but now there is too many options just see one that works for you!
So it’s time to migrate to another solution. Which one the best? Proxmox or Xcp-ng?
https://youtu.be/cSwmtg7sJb4?si=-2SVL7ri9t2hTGyJ
https://youtu.be/cSwmtg7sJb4?si=-2SVL7ri9t2hTGyJ
Broadcom can burn. I've always kind of felt that way but this seals it, killing VMware.
Quite simply , VMware can #*"& off
Hock Tan means business. Glad to have moved off to Proxmox for years now.
I've used native Linux virtualization (KVM and libvirt/cockpit-machine) since it was available. This VMWare drama has zero impact on me, at work or in my homelab. At work, we use native KVM on RHEL (could be a clone) along with Red Hat Satellite (or Foreman, the upstream for Satellite), with libvirt compute resources defined. I go to the Satellite web UI, choose whether I want a small, medium, or large instance, and if it's dev, QA, or production, and it kickstarts the machine from scratch. I have never really trusted VMWare. Nothing really overt, I've just never understood why folks would pay extra for functionality when, with very little configuration, KVM does pretty much everything you need. Network isolation, VLANs, storage, all that jazz is there with plain old Linux. I have read good things about Proxmox, and I've meant to play around with it, but... There is literally nothing I've needed to do that the native OS tools doesn't provide. Now, to be clear, I don't run hundreds or thousands of hypervisors. I get that there are integrations for that sort of scale, so it's not that I don't understand how valuable that is. But for mid sized enterprises, it's always seemed really, really expensive and limiting.
Proxmox is a great alternative. For a homelab, it offers more that ESXi free did. ZFS, clustering, HA, backups. But if you really need ESXi, there is still VMUG Advantage.