VMware vSphere ESXi free edition is dead
kb.vmware.com
kb.vmware.com
Regrettably, there is currently no substitute product offered.*
You can feel that the employee that wrote this knows this is a sinking ship.
Not quite.
Microsoft gives away Hyper-V Server for free, no license key needed. It is not time limited or crippled in any way.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/evaluate-hyper-v-...
It runs in Server Core mode and the learning curve is much steeper outside an AD domain or for non-Windows turbonerds; but once set up properly it is extremely powerful and I prefer it over VMware. Linux support for Hyper-V is built-in and outstanding.
microsoft virtualization is long stuck in the past and forgotten, iykwim
if you need something more or less sane luke esxi, proxmox or even xen are way to go.
All HyperV hosts can only run Windows and certain Linux distros, this is not a limitation of the free offering.
Passthrough is also not available for most types of hardware in all versions of HyperV. An imperfect workaround is to use passthrough with Remote Desktop. I’m not telling you it’s good I’m telling you it exists.
HyperV server has a basic cli interface and it is indeed harder to manage than Windows Server with a desktop experience. When using the Server Core versions which do not have the desktop experience or the LTSC versions, the ui is the same. Some commands are not available.
Yes there has not been a release of the dedicated HyperV offering since 2016. It does not mean Microsoft will not release another one.
Sure seems to be the way they are thinking / acting / talking in public though.
https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/windows-server-inside...
https://www.reddit.com/r/HyperV/comments/pejok9/microsoft_is...
I'm not sure where y'all are picking this up from, FreeBSD is even officially supported. I've run Redox and Haiku in it as well.
For non-production use cases though I recommend grabbing the latest Windows Server via a trial instead. The downside is you get 180 days per period and it can be renewed for 3 periods before it expires. The upside is you can just install Server Datacenter and get the kitchen sink, including full desktop. You do one VM migration and re-install and then the when that trial fully expires it's time to upgrade to the newer version of Windows Server anyways.
In which case, of course, Proxmox is there since years. So why would you encrap yourself with hyper-v and postpone the show for only a couple of years when you could implement a robust solution ?
If you're building a hip new product with a bunch of Linux VMs you defined yourself greenfield then it probably seems a little ridiculous, especially since most of your stuff is likely containers or at least hybrid cloud conscious out of the gate. At that point you can grab a low cost subscription for your couple of servers and call it a day for a few grand a year.
Nutanix is probably the option most people looking at (or currently using) Hyper-V would be weighing right now.
There are several substitute products, Proxmox being a common one.
"VMware vSphere Hypervisor (free edition) is no longer available on the VMware website"
Almost an invitation to download it from various alternative places.
I run all of my Windows Server / 10 / 11 client VMs on ESXi for testing my Java software product.
I'm getting the impression that proxmox is the only real alternative for Windows guests?
I do need to get packet captures from the host so maybe Linux is better than something like Hyper-V?
I'd install Proxmox in a VM and give it a try if you want to see how it goes.
I feel as though, roughly 2 years ago, Proxmox became better in the simplistic manner of doing the right things like how ESXi became the defacto hypervisor. VMWare's antiquated management for upgrades of the entire ecosystem became a nightmare in the last 5 years. I worked in the NSX Security group for a while and just getting it installed internally was a nightmare of dependencies. RIP ESXi, the nostalgia will live on, but it was past its prime.
They were preparing to spin up an entire EC2 dedicated instance plus purchase another VMware license for me to onboard with for learning. I was absolutely pleading with them to just let me use KVM, I already have a Linux box at home I can just run the VM as-is for free
After pressing the CEO about it he finally relented and let me set it up on my little home server. From what I can tell thanks to virtio and KVM treating Linux as a first class citizen it actually feels faster than the VMware setup
I'm absolutely chomping at the bit to push for us to become "hypervisor agnostic" and bring on Hyper-V and Proxmox at the very least. There's no sense in being tied to VMware anymore as customers are scrambling to escape it
Another bit of good news for those making money off Proxmox, Kubevirt, and OpenShift.
Hard to see how vSphere / ESXi survives this acquisition, long term, even if many companies limp along for the next so many years.
" Ignore the SMB/homelabber at your peril...
VMware (20+ years ago) cast their net out as far as possible. They embraced partners, channels, users big and small, experienced and beginner. That formed the foundation of a massive ecosystem of community knowledge around their products that made them attractive (in addition to the stability & ease of use). None of their rivals ever came close to this. That's part of the reason they have such a massive market share (80% of VM workloads not running in the cloud run on VMware).
ESXi free was extremely limited, but it allowed users easy access to the hypervisor to deploy it in a home environment to see what the fuss is about. It gets beginners/novices interested in the product, and eventually the add-on products. From there it's an easy hop to VMUG licensing and additional products to get familiar with the rest of the VMware stack.
Those novice users are usually employed at entry-level jobs at smaller companies, and they tend to stick with what they know or have learned, so ESXi free becomes an easy deployment for those businesses. From there it's an easy hop to adding additional licences as they realise they need a vCenter and more of the advanced features to stay on top of everything (and the beauty of ESXi is that it's just a licence key change to unlock all of the features, no reinstall of a full version over the top of the free one).
Those novice users gain experience, some move on to larger companies in more senior positions, and that knowledge, experience and product inertia continue to snowball into more VMware deployments, more add-on products used (maybe some of the vRealize/Aria stuff, or NSX, or vSAN) and you have a full ecosystem of end-users who are advocates for the solutions used.
That was certainly my journey - I deployed ESXi free about 15 years ago onto a single host in my network lab to see what the fuss was about. It ended up sparking an interest and knowledge in a field that culminated in me eventually being employed by VMware and working with their biggest customers and partners globally.
You can ignore those SMBs and home users and still make money, but don't be surprised if in 5+ years time you have a massively reduced market share further up the tree with large commercial/enterprise customers. With Broadcoms pricing changes I'd suspect it'll be even sooner than that... "
[1] https://forums.theregister.com/forum/all/2024/02/13/broadcom...
Some more discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39352090
Suppose I could fire up proxmox but meh, I’m already too familiar with HyperV for how much my clients use it.
https://www.theregister.com/2021/08/31/hyper_v_server_discon...