End of General Avalailability of the Free VSphere Hypervisor (ESXi 7.x and 8.x) | Hacker News Reader

End of General Avalailability of the Free VSphere Hypervisor (ESXi 7.x and 8.x)

kb.vmware.com

39 pointsmjlee18 comments

I assume this action is intended to drive freeloading business users to a paid platform but it is also going to choke off the pipeline of homelab VMware users who have developed expertise and affinity for VMware.

We will be reading case studies about this in the not too distant future.

We’d all like to pretend this matters but Adobe pulled the plug on bootleg Photoshop years ago and it doesn’t appear to have hurt them.

Hobbyists are only useful during the growth phase when companies are competing with each other for Market shares.

Disagree.

They're also useful if they're a decision-maker looking for a different solution.

If I were a virtualisation tech company right now I'd be throwing free non-commercial or limited commercial use licences around to try to steal Broadcom's market share.

Adobe Premiere on Windows was for a very long time the de facto standard, but them stopping to provide affordable personal usage perpetual licenses, just opened the gateway for alternatives, and Da Vinci Resolve really stepped up here, allowing to you run it for free with a majority of features available.

and ESXi free version with reduced features offered the same approach. This broadcom change will push the majority to alternatives, for personal and professional use.

previously there was basically no contender for polished enterprise ready hypervisors, small business were all VMware shops. These will all convert to alternative technologies, shifting the balance.

vmware might turn out to be the AS400 of hypervisors...

I lost a bet. I figured it would take them till 3rd quarter to kill this. My VMware admin buddy knew better. I'm buying the beer next time.

The only reason I know and have recommended VMWare in the past is because this existed.

Anticipated as soon as the buyout was approved. It's so long VmWare, hello Proxmox for me

I can't imagine how this is mapped out over time to generate profit from the acquisition, knowing that they are destroying any long-tail business. Hypervisors aren't Mainframes. This isn't the lock-in they think it is.

Michael Dell played an amazing hand, and won. Then the loser just decided to go all-in on their pair-of 4's on the very next hand. Bonkers.

I would think that by now the homelab crowd moved to Hyper-v or KVM based solution.

I just upgraded the last of my homelab to 8.x. I started out on 5.x. Since my $DAYJOB isn't in ops but we have a large VMWare installed base, it's been very useful to be able to speak the platform ops guys language.

Does hyper-v support usb passthrough by now?

I looked into it two years ago or so and it just wasn’t possible, which is a dealbreaker in a homelab imo.

At least this is written clearly, unlike their previous announcements.

Does this also impact server manufacturer customized images?

Broadcom terminated all OEM relationships already at the beginning of the year.

Ive been trying to understand the motivations theyve had for killing off so many products. I cant wrap my head around it. They bought VmWare and then shit on 85% of its paying customers and profit drivers (OEM) claiming profit driven cuts, but i dont get how they see the end of that play? And now they are backhanding anyone who has uses for ESXi free.. to what end?

Like what is the long term goal? And what does that look like at the end? Are they going to try and turn VmWare into a cloud only platform the likes of aws/gcp? Thats the only final destination i can think of that even remotely makes sense given the product chopping block

VMware clearly doesn't want any new customers and I suspect they haven't had any for years anyway. The plan is to move existing customers to subscription bundles (I don't see how that's different from a perpetual license plus support contract but whatever). The products aren't changing that much but some customers will have to buy a larger bundle to get the features they want. I assume the OEM licensing will come back just with different pricing.

They bought the patents, i imagine. The rest is just a bonus.

As it was explained to me, there's enough cream in taking the top 10% of customers direct, that ruining all their other relationships is worth it.

At least in the short term. Because if you are a VMWare partner who just had your biggest customer taken away from you to go Broadcom direct, you are probably now a HyperV, ProxMox or X Cloud shop, looking to lure your big whale back.

We started pushing people away from VMWare when the Broadcom acquisition hit and its been constantly reinforced as a great idea.

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