Obviously this isn’t for everyone, but Broadcom have announced that they are making the free ESXi hypervisor available again.
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.
The license is embedded in the download.
Proxmox is also free, doesn't have a predatory company behind it. Not really a deal.
If you want to practice administering ESXi to prep for an interview or exam, this is very much a deal.
Broadcom killed the small and medium deployments for esxi.
Will probably take more than that to rebuild goodwill
And enterprise too
VMware (and now Broadcom) is dead in the water. Everyone is moving to Cloud. On-premise ESXi Hosts are a thing of the past
When was the last time anyone went to VMware/Dell/Broadcom Conference
@neonlight: Everyone is moving to docker/kubernetes. Whether it's cloud or on prem is irrelevant. VMs will likely be around for a long time to come but are dropping off very rapidly.
@MikeKulls: Whilst I agree Docker/containers is great for many things, its no substitute for VMs, there are lots of scenarios where VMs are more suitable.
But it's not a deal? The product was originally free, then they got rid of it, and now it's back
Trump inspired.
You would just run trial versions for that. Broadcom cannot be trusted.
It is too limited to be actually useful for prepping for an exam.
They also changed the old program that gave people access to all products (for a fee) for homelab / training use, to require VMware certification to access.
Broadcom is a clown company.
Most everyone I've spoken to is planning on moving away from ESXi, we've been with ESXi since we stated, we just got our renewals, and we've renewed only to give us time to migrate to something else.
There's no good faith left.
Same here. We moved away after 15 years.
I think that's mainly due to the licence cost though, which is irrelevant here.
@MikeKulls: No. Because the reason to use this license is to learn ESXi, but when most of the industry is moving to other solutions, not much point in learning ESXi.
@MikeKulls: That's a pretty small use case, if you're using it 'to use it' you'd be better using & learning something else because Broadcom will more then likely take it away again.
Yeah man we're also busy running inventories to migrate off before our next Renewal,like 1500VMs easily
It's not April 1 anymore.
On April 1st
😂
I see you fell for the……oh well, never mind. Do you remember the date when you found out?
Today! Oops. Thanks for the correction.
Make an account and go here to download:
https://support.broadcom.com/group/ecx/productfiles?subFamil…
EDIT: Spent 20 mins trying to use my account with a public email address only to find out that I couldn't use my public email and have any entitlement to download anything. I will tell you, this website is cooked. Good luck if anyone else wants to try lol
It is fully cooked, my work account could access all the software associated with our perpetual licences prior to the Broadcom takeover but now you need active maintenance to see anything. My login is useless now. Terrible company…
It's all a shambles. Anyway, we're in Azure now. Part of our environment is still in AVS (Azure VMware Services) but slowly is being moved to native Azure VMs.
100% one of the worst sites to navigate, how they can make such a simple thing so complicated is beyond me
Aaaah Broadcom… the HardlyNormal of the tech space… I've used VMware since v3.5 and Broadcom didn't fail to fail when they finally acquired them… this time around i couldn't migrate to something else like we did when they bought out Symantec many moons ago…. :(
Fkn Broadcom
Nah, nice try, it's free until they lure you back in and then make it paid again!
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice shame on me! Don't be a fool!
Proxmox is completely free and is far better.
And a few others:
* Xen
* KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine)
* QEMU
* VirtualBox
* OpenVZ
* Lguest
* oVirt
A lot of redundancy in that list.
FYI, Proxmox and oVirt use the KVM hypervisor. QEMU too, when it is not just an emulaotr.
Xen, KVM and Virtualbox are the actual hypervisors.
Is Lguest still a thing?
But they're all still separate products, so listing them is fair. Gives more options for what you're after.
My advice, if you don't really know much/anything and just starting, I'd go with virtualbox. It's significantly more basic, less complexity but less features, and works well enough (yeah it's Oracle lol)
Oracle have had it for 15 years now, and not wrecked it, so I'm OK with that :)
Forgot xcp-ng
Came to say the same. Id say given its free, this is the most important one.
And you can even compile xen orchestra for all features… My second home lab uses it.
You forgot the MS offering. I can't even remember it's name
Hyper-V, and it is free. Why not?
We still run esxi essentials and we were paying a little over $120 per year for maintenance …. Our most recent renewal quote after scumcom took over was a tad over $7000 …
I politely told our reseller that scumcom can go to hell.
Loll we have a much bigger foot print… Luckily for us it wasn't a big up-tick, seems if you are a smaller operator they aren't interested and if you have a massive environment they'll take you to the cleaners… But they'll try and screw us at some point I have no doubt!
"'Fool me once, shame on…shame on you.' Fool me—you can't get fooled again."
VMWare workstation is free too for home use, and more suited to the home. ESXi only for education purposes, as above.
Anyone running VMs on Kubernetes/Openshift (aka KubeVirt/OVirt)?
openshift is dead?
why run a vm in kubes? GPU?
Thank you but I've no interest in whatever fraudcom has to offer.
(profanity) i hate broadcom
Mostly IT gals and guys here. Broadcom are toilet. The transition, unless you are an institution or large Corp is insane.
Perpetual licensing…
No more esxi for free.. Dumbass at least you get more exposure to a dying/dead product. It's free now though, lightbulb?
It's still the goto for onprem but broadcom (profanity) that so hard, 80% of customers went to cloud.
Nice work.
Oracle and now Broadcom are the mafia of the IT industry.
To be fair, MySQL…..but maybe because everyone would just move to mariadb…
I wonder if they have just done it for people running old versions, get them to update, then turn off free.
Because they can't unfree old versions….
That said, anytime running free can't afford to pay Broadcom money anyways.
ESXI still are good product. Version 8 original are free from vmware, unless they keep update for windows 12 support, etc.
Can’t trick me again Broadcom.
Anyone looking for a hypervisor replacement, just use proxmox. I switch to it and never looked back
NEVER, TYPE 0 FTW!
go xcp-ng!
seen reports that this "Free" is a trial that lasts 60 days. after that you cant reboot devices or create new ones.
F Broadcom. they screwed us all.
SEXi deal for sure.