Broadcom yanks ESXi Free version, effective immediately

3 years ago by kalpol to c/selfhosted

I'd expected this but it still sucks.

Crogdor 121 points 3 years ago

There are two kinds of datacenter admins, those who aren’t using VMWare, and those who are migrating away from VMWare.

save

path: 0 7481554, hotness: undefined, score: 121, children: 0

brygphilomena 100 points 3 years ago

Regrettably, there is currently no substitute product offered.

I really don't think you regret a God damn thing broadcom.

save

path: 0 7478596, hotness: undefined, score: 100, children: 12

cyberpunk007 29 points 3 years ago

If you're already running windows, hyper-v. theres proxmox, and tons of others. So they are mistaken. 🤣

save

path: 0 7478596 7485847, hotness: undefined, score: 29, children: 11

CazRaX 14 points 3 years ago

They mean that they aren't offering another solution.

save

path: 0 7478596 7485847 7495721, hotness: undefined, score: 14, children: 1

cyberpunk007 3 points 3 years ago

I know, but this is the way I read it when they claim to give no option.

save

path: 0 7478596 7485847 7495721 7497583, hotness: undefined, score: 3, children: 0

TheHolm -9 points 3 years ago

All of them not equate in same league. Do you know any type 1 free supervises out there? Xen probably.

save

path: 0 7478596 7485847 7487836, hotness: undefined, score: -9, children: 8

cyberpunk007 23 points 3 years ago

Proxmox, Xen, hyper-v are all considered type 1 as far as I'm aware.

save

path: 0 7478596 7485847 7487836 7488508, hotness: undefined, score: 23, children: 0

MangoPenguin 8 points 3 years ago

Proxmox

save

path: 0 7478596 7485847 7487836 7501164, hotness: undefined, score: 8, children: 0

Voroxpete 5 points 3 years ago

I assume what you're looking for specifically here is a complete platform that you can install on bare-metal, not just the actual hypervisor itself. In which case consider any of these:

Proxmox
XCP-NG
Windows Hyper-V Server Core (basically Windows Server Nano with Hyper-V)
Any Linux distro running KVM/QEMU - Add Cockpit if you need a web interface, or use Virt-Manager, either directly or over X-forwarding

save

path: 0 7478596 7485847 7487836 7530819, hotness: undefined, score: 5, children: 2

Anarch157a 2 points 3 years ago

Any Linux distro running KVM/QEMU - Add Cockpit if you need a web interface, or use Virt-Manager, either directly or over X-forwarding

No need for X forwarding, you can connect Virt-Manager to a remote system that has libvirt,

save

path: 0 7478596 7485847 7487836 7530819 7553944, hotness: undefined, score: 2, children: 1

Sethayy 5 points 3 years ago

KVM makes proxmox type 1

save

path: 0 7478596 7485847 7487836 7500667, hotness: undefined, score: 5, children: 0

jelloeater85 0 points 3 years ago

I'm not sure why you're getting down voted, you're right. I'm not sure if anyone would run Proxmox for their enterprise hypervisor? I mean HyperV is okay. Slim pickings for big orgs. I know there's Nutanix, but most folks are moving to the big three for VMs and hosting.

save

path: 0 7478596 7485847 7487836 7517065, hotness: undefined, score: 0, children: 1

ssdfsdf3488sd 1 point 3 years ago

I am running proxmox at a moderately sized corp. The lack of a real support contract almost kills it, which is too bad because it is a decent product

save

path: 0 7478596 7485847 7487836 7517065 7649485, hotness: undefined, score: 1, children: 0

Moonrise2473 70 points 3 years ago

RIP VMware.

Broadcom prefers to milk the top 500 customers with unreasonable fees rather than bother with the rest of the world. They know that nobody with a brain would intentionally start a new datacenter with VMware solutions

save

path: 0 7478462, hotness: undefined, score: 70, children: 3

Anti_Iridium 4 points 3 years ago

Not anymore, thats for damn sure.

save

path: 0 7478462 7496939, hotness: undefined, score: 4, children: 0

jelloeater85 1 point 3 years ago

It's really sad, they used to be amazing and the goto for running Linux VMs on back in the day. Still haven't seen anyone do hardware pass through as well.

save

path: 0 7478462 7516950, hotness: undefined, score: 1, children: 0

Voroxpete 1 point 3 years ago

When big players like AWS are running KVM and XCP-NG, yeah. VMware is basically the also-ran at this point.

save

path: 0 7478462 7530845, hotness: undefined, score: 1, children: 0

Changer098 57 points 3 years ago

Well dang, I guess that "learn about proxmox" line on my to-do list just moved a little higher. For the most part, I've enjoyed using ESXi and am sad to see it go.

save

path: 0 7480243, hotness: undefined, score: 57, children: 12

LrdThndr 14 points 3 years ago

FWIW, I run proxmox at home, and I friggin love it. It's really not hard at all.

save

path: 0 7480243 7497054, hotness: undefined, score: 14, children: 11

dan 2 points 3 years ago

I like Unraid... It has a UI for VMs and LXC containers like Proxmox, but it also has a pretty good Docker UI. I've got most things running on Docker on my home server, but I've also got one VM (Windows Server 2022 for Blue Iris) and two LXC containers. (LXC support is a plugin; it doesn't come out-of-the-box)

Docker with Proxmox is a bit weird, since it doesn't actually support Docker and you have to run Docker inside an LXC container or VM.

save

path: 0 7480243 7497054 7501746, hotness: undefined, score: 2, children: 10

Lifebandit666 2 points 3 years ago

I'm in the market for a nas or thinclient for these kinds of things, an upgrade for my RPi Home Assistant.

I'm stuck at hardware at the moment and think a cheap 2bay NAS is probably the way to go. My concern is that I won't be able to run all the things on a NAS mainly because I'm clueless. This community talks in maths (as Radiohead say) so half the time I'm trying to decipher all the LXCs and other acronyms.

Anyway, I think I need to learn PROXMOX or Unraid so your comment has me interested.

My question to you is this: since your server is plugged in via ethernet, can you access the Windows VM via web interface? Or does it require a screen, keyboard, mouse, etc?

I think I'm gonna be running HA in a VM, along with Adguard and maybe LMS in docker containers, then probably a Windows VM for Arr and Plex. I assume all these things will have their own port but I'm just not 100% about the actual Windows VM

save

path: 0 7480243 7497054 7501746 7527830, hotness: undefined, score: 2, children: 5

dan 1 point 3 years ago

I'd recommend building your own server rather than buying an off-the-shelf NAS. The NAS will have limited upgrade options - usually, if you want to make it more powerful in the future, you'll have to buy a new one. If you build your own, you can freely upgrade it in the future - add more memory (RAM), make it faster by replacing the CPU with a better one, etc.

If you want a small one, the Asus Prime AP201 is a pretty nice (and affordable!) case.

save

path: 0 7480243 7497054 7501746 7527830 7537578, hotness: undefined, score: 1, children: 0

Scrath 1 point 3 years ago

I run a couple of containers on my lenovo mini pc. I have proxmox installed on bare metal and then one VM for truenas, one for docker containers and one for home assistant OS.

For me the limiting factor is definitely RAM. I have 20GB (because the machine came with a 2x4GB configuration and I bought a single 16GB upgrade stick) and am constantly at ~98% utilization.

To be fair, about half of that is eaten up by TrueNAS alone due to ZFS.

The point I'm trying to make is basically make sure you can put enough RAM into your machine. Some NAS have soldered memory you won't be able to upgrade. The CPU performance you need highly depends on what you want to do.

In my case the only CPU intensive task I have is media transcoding which can often be offloaded to dedicated bardware like intel quicksync. The only annoying exception is hardware transcoding of x265 media which is apparently only supported from intel 7th gen and upwards processors and I have a 6th gen i5... Or maybe I configured something wrong. No clue

Edit: I wrote that after reading the first half of your comment. Regarding connecting a screen, I think I had one connected once to set up proxmox. Afterwards I just log into the proxmox web interface. If required I can use that to get a GUI session of each VM as well.

save

path: 0 7480243 7497054 7501746 7527830 7532637, hotness: undefined, score: 1, children: 3

___ 1 point 3 years ago

I’ve just learned about converting docker containers to lxc natively, so that’s my next project.

save

path: 0 7480243 7497054 7501746 7505212, hotness: undefined, score: 1, children: 3

Auli 1 point 3 years ago

I moved from lxc to docker. Much easier to manage.

save

path: 0 7480243 7497054 7501746 7505212 7511009, hotness: undefined, score: 1, children: 0

dan 1 point 3 years ago

I personally prefer Docker over LXC since the containers are essentially immutable. You can completely delete and recreate a container without causing issues. All your data is stored outside the container in a Docker volume, so deleting the container doesn't delete your volume. Your docker-compose describes the exact state of the containers (as long as you use version numbers rather than tags like latest)

Good Docker containers are "distroless" which means it only contains the app and the bare minimum dependencies for the app to run, without any extraneous OS stuff in it. LXC containers aren't as light since as far as I know they always contain an OS.

save

path: 0 7480243 7497054 7501746 7505212 7505695, hotness: undefined, score: 1, children: 1

mindlight 41 points 3 years ago

Along with the termination of perpetual licensing, Broadcom has also decided to discontinue the Free ESXi Hypervisor, marking it as EOGA (End of General Availability).

Wiktionary: Adjective perpetual (not comparable) Lasting forever, or for an indefinitely long time.

Hello ProxMox here I come!

save

path: 0 7475420, hotness: undefined, score: 41, children: 19

kn33 9 points 3 years ago

They're terminating in the sense that they won't sell it anymore. They're not breaking the licensing they've already sold (mostly, there was some fuckery with activating licensing they sold through third parties)

save

path: 0 7475420 7479120, hotness: undefined, score: 9, children: 2

kalpol 4 points 3 years ago

Sort of. The activation license will work as long as you have it. They won't renew support though, which effectively kills it when the support contract runs out.

save

path: 0 7475420 7479120 7496524, hotness: undefined, score: 4, children: 1

kn33 1 point 3 years ago

You won't be able to upgrade to new versions when the support contract runs out, but you can install updates to the existing version as long as updates are made for it. This has always been the lifecycle for perpetual licensing. It's good forever, but at a certain point it becomes a security risk to continue using. The difference here is they won't sell you another perpetual license when the lifecycle is up.

save

path: 0 7475420 7479120 7496524 7499221, hotness: undefined, score: 1, children: 0

TCB13 -38 points 3 years ago

Hello ProxMox here I come!

Proxmox is questionable open-source, performs poorly and will most likely end up burning the free users at some point. Get get yourself into LXC/LXD/Incus that does both containers and VMs, is way more performant and clean and is also available on Debian's repositories.

save

path: 0 7475420 7476118, hotness: undefined, score: -38, children: 15

timbuck2themoon 20 points 3 years ago

You know, you can recommend lxd and whatever without putting out FUD about proxmox and other tech.

save

path: 0 7475420 7476118 7480467, hotness: undefined, score: 20, children: 14

TCB13 -7 points 3 years ago

While I get your point... I kind of can't: https://lemmy.world/comment/7476411

save

path: 0 7475420 7476118 7480467 7493720, hotness: undefined, score: -7, children: 13

acockworkorange 6 points 3 years ago

What about Proxmox makes its license questionable?

save

path: 0 7475420 7476118 7480467 7493720 7495635, hotness: undefined, score: 6, children: 12

0110010001100010 30 points 3 years ago

Really glad I made the transition from ESXi to Docker containers about a year ago. Easier to manage too and lighter on resources. Plus upgrades are a breeze. Should have done that years ago...

save

path: 0 7475587, hotness: undefined, score: 30, children: 28

kalpol 11 points 3 years ago

I need full on segregated machines sometimes though. I've got stuff that only runs in Win98 or XP (old radio programming software).

save

path: 0 7475587 7475815, hotness: undefined, score: 11, children: 24

DeltaTangoLima 34 points 3 years ago

Might be time to look into Proxmox. There's a fun weekend project for you!

save

path: 0 7475587 7475815 7476046, hotness: undefined, score: 34, children: 15

TCB13 -22 points 3 years ago

Save yourself time and future headaches and try LXD/Incus instead.

save

path: 0 7475587 7475815 7476046 7476206, hotness: undefined, score: -22, children: 14

DeltaTangoLima 10 points 3 years ago

No headaches here - running a two node cluster with about 40 LXCs, many of them using Docker, and an OPNsense VM. It's been flawless for me.

save

path: 0 7475587 7475815 7476046 7476206 7476264, hotness: undefined, score: 10, children: 13

DoctorWhookah 7 points 3 years ago

Do you work for a railroad? That sounds too familiar.

save

path: 0 7475587 7475815 7475881, hotness: undefined, score: 7, children: 3

kalpol 5 points 3 years ago

Lol no, just old radios. My point is just that my requirements are pretty widely varied.

save

path: 0 7475587 7475815 7475881 7476233, hotness: undefined, score: 5, children: 2

tyablix 2 points 3 years ago

I'm curious what radio software you use that has these requirements?

save

path: 0 7475587 7475815 7475881 7476233 7521280, hotness: undefined, score: 2, children: 1

eerongal 5 points 3 years ago

I agree with the other poster; you should look into proxmox. I migrated from ESXi to proxmox 7-8 years ago or so, and honestly its been WAY better than ESXi. The migration process was pretty easy too, i was able to bring over the images from ESXi and load them directly into proxmox.

save

path: 0 7475587 7475815 7476193, hotness: undefined, score: 5, children: 0

MangoPenguin 4 points 3 years ago

If you're running a basic linux install you can use KVM for some VMs. Or use Proxmox for a good ESXi replacement.

save

path: 0 7475587 7475815 7477147, hotness: undefined, score: 4, children: 1

TCB13 -3 points 3 years ago

Or... LXD/Incus.

save

path: 0 7475587 7475815 7477147 7479813, hotness: undefined, score: -3, children: 0

TCB13 -8 points 3 years ago

Fear no my friend. Get get yourself into LXC/LXD/Incus as it can do both containers and full virtual machines. It is available on Debian's repositories and is fully and truly open-source.

save

path: 0 7475587 7475815 7476101, hotness: undefined, score: -8, children: 0

TCB13 -13 points 3 years ago

So... you replaced a property solution by a free one that depends on proprietary components and a proprietary distribution mechanism? Get get yourself into LXC/LXD/Incus (that does both containers and VMs) and is available on Debian's repositories. Or Podman if you really like the mess that Docker is.

save

path: 0 7475587 7476077, hotness: undefined, score: -13, children: 2

kalpol 7 points 3 years ago

I've seen you recommending this here before - what's its selling point vs say qemu-kvm? Does Incus do virtual networking without having to straight up learn iptables or whatever? (Not that there is anything wrong with iptables, I just have to choose what I can learn about)

save

path: 0 7475587 7476077 7476218, hotness: undefined, score: 7, children: 1

TCB13 4 points 3 years ago

Does Incus do virtual networking without having to straight up learn iptables or whatever?

That's the just one of the things it does. It goes much further as it can create clusters, download, manage and create OS images, run backups and restores, bootstrap things with cloud-init, move containers and VMs between servers (even live sometimes). Another big advantage is the fact that it provides a unified experience to deal with both containers and VMs, no need to learn two different tools / APIs as the same commands and options will be used to manage both. Even profiles defining storage, network resources and other policies can be shared and applied across both containers and VMs.

save

path: 0 7475587 7476077 7476218 7476304, hotness: undefined, score: 4, children: 0

sj_zero 29 points 3 years ago

The most important thing for everyone to remember is that if you don't fully own the thing such that you can install and run it without asking permission, or if it isn't simply free and open source, then it can go away at any time.

save

path: 0 7478616, hotness: undefined, score: 29, children: 0

Lettuceeatlettuce 27 points 3 years ago

XCP-ng or Proxmox if you need a bare metal hypervisor. Both open source, powerful, mature, and have large communities with lots of helpful documentation.

I think you can migrate ESXi VMs directly to XCP-ng. I have moved onto it about 6 months ago and it has been solid. Steep learning curve, but really great once you get the hang of it, and enterprise grade if you need stuff like HA clustering and complex virtual networking solutions.

save

path: 0 7477704, hotness: undefined, score: 27, children: 1

Disaster 6 points 3 years ago

I managed to migrate all mine to libvirt when I dumped esxi. They dropped support for the old opteron I was running at the time, so I couldn't upgrade to v7. Welp, Fedora Server does just as well and I've been moving the VM hosted services into containers anyway.

Ofc... well, we'll see what IBM does with RedHat. Probably something like this eventually. They simply can't help themselves.

save

path: 0 7477704 7479417, hotness: undefined, score: 6, children: 0

blackstrat 21 points 3 years ago

Oh no!

Anyway...

Been on Proxmox for a couple of years and it's been great.

save

path: 0 7476934, hotness: undefined, score: 21, children: 0

ziviz 10 points 3 years ago

Yay... Capitalism...

save

path: 0 7475674, hotness: undefined, score: 10, children: 2

TCB13 6 points 3 years ago

This was totally expected, even before BCM bought them. This is the same thing we had with CentOS/ReadHat and that will happen with Docker/DockerHub and all the people that moved from CentOS to Ubuntu.

save

path: 0 7475674 7476250, hotness: undefined, score: 6, children: 0

possiblylinux127 -14 points 3 years ago

Its not capitalism it just is business. No one is making you use it.

save

path: 0 7475674 7476980, hotness: undefined, score: -14, children: 0

brickfrog 8 points 3 years ago

Sucks but not surprising. Broadcom has a history of doing things like this, ugh. Even with their paid products they jack up the price so much that the only customers that stick around are the business enterprise types that are locked in & can't easily migrate for various reasons.

save

path: 0 7479428, hotness: undefined, score: 8, children: 0

Xartle 8 points 3 years ago

I'm shocked I tell you; simply shocked...

save

path: 0 7486428, hotness: undefined, score: 8, children: 0

angelsomething 6 points 3 years ago

Bummer. Oh well, good thing I’m learning proxmox eh.

save

path: 0 7476315, hotness: undefined, score: 6, children: 0

Damage 5 points 3 years ago

I wonder what's the future of vmware player

save

path: 0 7476253, hotness: undefined, score: 5, children: 1

possiblylinux127 11 points 3 years ago

Not bright...

save

path: 0 7476253 7476965, hotness: undefined, score: 11, children: 0

Decronym 4 points 3 years ago

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

Fewer Letters	More Letters
ESXi	VMWare virtual machine hypervisor
HA	Home Assistant automation software
~	High Availability
LTS	Long Term Support software version
LXC	Linux Containers
NAS	Network-Attached Storage
Plex	Brand of media server package
RPi	Raspberry Pi brand of SBC
SBC	Single-Board Computer
ZFS	Solaris/Linux filesystem focusing on data integrity

8 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 4 acronyms.

[Thread #506 for this sub, first seen 12th Feb 2024, 20:15] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

save

path: 0 7477242, hotness: undefined, score: 4, children: 2

zorflieg 5 points 3 years ago

High Availability not Home Assistant.

save

path: 0 7477242 7477884, hotness: undefined, score: 5, children: 1

cyberpunk007 2 points 3 years ago

Depends which community you ask 🤣. It was definitely high availability first though.

save

path: 0 7477242 7477884 7485937, hotness: undefined, score: 2, children: 0

PlasterAnalyst 4 points 3 years ago

ESXi sucks

save

path: 0 7480125, hotness: undefined, score: 4, children: 3

jelloeater85 1 point 3 years ago

Have you ever used it?

save

path: 0 7480125 7516880, hotness: undefined, score: 1, children: 2

PlasterAnalyst -1 points 3 years ago

I don't own an IBM mainframe so.

save

path: 0 7480125 7516880 7529414, hotness: undefined, score: -1, children: 1

jelloeater85 1 point 3 years ago

So I take that as a no... Because you can run old VMware on literally any old junk box with a Intel nic.

save

path: 0 7480125 7516880 7529414 7584063, hotness: undefined, score: 1, children: 0

possiblylinux127 3 points 3 years ago

Hopefully everyone migrated.

save

path: 0 7476961, hotness: undefined, score: 3, children: 0

redfox 2 points 3 years ago

What about virtualizing windows?

Only thing I know of is hyperv, but it's not widely used I don't think and MS is pushing azure $tack right?

save

path: 0 7477521, hotness: undefined, score: 2, children: 7

MangoPenguin 3 points 3 years ago

Anything based on KVM does great

save

path: 0 7477521 7501201, hotness: undefined, score: 3, children: 1

dan 1 point 3 years ago

Just make sure you install the virtio drivers.

save

path: 0 7477521 7501201 7501815, hotness: undefined, score: 1, children: 0

cyberpunk007 3 points 3 years ago

Hyper-v is definitely wisely used...

Lots of hypervisors support windows. Ie proxmox

save

path: 0 7477521 7485912, hotness: undefined, score: 3, children: 3

atzanteol 2 points 3 years ago

To be pedantic - KVM is the hypervisor. Proxmox is a wrapper to it.

save

path: 0 7477521 7485912 7496725, hotness: undefined, score: 2, children: 2

Anarch157a 2 points 3 years ago

Being even more pedantic, KVM is the hypervisor, QEMU is a wrapper around it and Proxmox provides a management interface to it.

save

path: 0 7477521 7485912 7496725 7557220, hotness: undefined, score: 2, children: 0

cyberpunk007 1 point 3 years ago

Fair enough

save

path: 0 7477521 7485912 7496725 7497780, hotness: undefined, score: 1, children: 0

Socket462 2 points 3 years ago

I tried virtualizing Windows on proxmox and it went smooth

save

path: 0 7477521 7490821, hotness: undefined, score: 2, children: 0

tagginator 0 points 3 years ago

save

path: 0 7475155, hotness: undefined, score: 0, children: 0

bigMouthCommie -16 points 3 years ago

what does this mean for me? i have a lenovo 82k100lqus

save

path: 0 7475223, hotness: undefined, score: -16, children: 18

kalpol 5 points 3 years ago

Doesn't mean anything right now if you are running ESXi, except you can't reinstall ESXi unless you kept the image and you won't get ESXi updates.

save

path: 0 7475223 7475842, hotness: undefined, score: 5, children: 17

bigMouthCommie -19 points 3 years ago

i looked it up, and it's part of vmware? i don't run that so *shrug*

save

path: 0 7475223 7475842 7475865, hotness: undefined, score: -19, children: 16

possiblylinux127 0 points 3 years ago

*proxmox*

save

path: 0 7475223 7475842 7475865 7476996, hotness: undefined, score: 0, children: 15

bigMouthCommie -1 points 3 years ago

oh, fuck. really? what if i have 12 year old copy?

save

path: 0 7475223 7475842 7475865 7476996 7477125, hotness: undefined, score: -1, children: 8

TCB13 -6 points 3 years ago

*proxmox*

*LXD/Incus*

save

path: 0 7475223 7475842 7475865 7476996 7479845, hotness: undefined, score: -6, children: 5