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Comment by whalesalad | Hacker News Reader

Free esxi is pretty crippled at this point, esp for high core counts. Proxmox is the way to go!

Does Proxmox have a free version available, or is it only available for purchase?

Asking because although their website says its OSS it's super unclear what to download for homelab use.

If they're seriously wanting people to pay $$$ even to run it on old homelab gear, that's not going to work (for me). ;)

Yes it's totally free. They have a subscription for enterprise (which isn't all that expensive really). But I have run it in production (for a bit to demonstrate use) and in my homelab for free.

What about Nutanix?

Nutanix has a Community Edition which works well, but has some fairly strict requirements due to the overhead of their controller VMs and such

https://www.nutanix.com/products/community-edition

I know(? it's been a while) that Nutanix focuses on HCI, so maybe less of an issue, but for me, even at home, all my storage backing is iSCSI over 10G. Nutanix CE purposefully doesn't support 10gbps NICs.

Just took a look at their website, and they don't even allow people to download their "Community Edition" without first providing an email address (with some basic validation of it), first and last name, phone number, job title, and company name.

Fuck that. They can go and fuck themselves sideways instead. :(

I would not choose it for a greenfield project unless I knew that they had a particular module for more enterprise-grade stuff like doing hardcore/proprietary interconnects.

Acropolis is free but severely limits your choices when it comes to hardware and expansion down the line. I always felt like you were putting yourself over a barrel to consolidate both hypervisor and physical infrastructure to a single vendor.

What about xcp-ng?

I intensely disliked xcp-ng when I tried it a few years back. It's more of a move fast and break things indie type of project. Proxmox feels more stable and trustworthy.

I went w/ bhyve; I like to have full control over the system.

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