VMware Free ESXi = No Longer Free

[Sturniolo]

Hey Everyone... With the recent announcement of Broadcom changing their offered portfolio... As of today Feb 12, 2024, VMware vSphere Hypervisor (free edition) is no longer available on the VMware website.

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).

Regrettably, there is currently no substitute product offered.


For more information, you can check out the official KB article. https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/2107518?lang=en_US

[chris.childerhose]

It is a shame they removed the free version as it was a good learning tool for those wanting to get VMware certified and smaller companies. I wonder what will happen next as I hear a lot about Proxmox now.

[mdwophil]

People make a lot of noise about Proxmox and XenServer/XCP-ng, but for a lot of people they are completely irrelevant.

Lots of mid-market and larger companies with in-house virtualization are stuck with VMware vSphere or Microsoft Hyper-V.

We have a number of virtual appliances provided by our application vendors where they support a limited number of virtualization platforms.

Finding alternatives to those applications range from completely impossible to non-trivial, and unsupported configurations (such as converting the virtual disk to something usable by KVM-based solutions like Proxmox, or whatever disk format XenServer/XCP-ng uses) is completely out of the question.

Sometimes you can throw Nutanix into the mix, sometimes not. 4 out of the 5 major applications that are provided to us as virtual appliances support vSphere, Hyper-V, and Nutanix. There's just one straggler...

[MVanek]

Yeah, thats all true. I dont want to excuse Broadcom, but a lot of enterprise grade products doesnt offer any type of free usable product at all and companies still buy it.
Speaking about learning and certification - there are still ways like VMUG as I am aware still will be available for these purposes https://www.vmug.com/wp-content/uploads ... &_zl=1LWR9
For me the real sad and painful is the aggresive approach with really poor communication towards end-users of all this products.
We still have some customers, who bought vsphere products weeks/months ago and some of them still doesnt have their keys/licenses or even customer accounts. Currently is unavailable to make some changes and requests regarding partner accounts....
This is something I would never expect with this kind of business. This goes hand-in-hand with really increasing/changing price model.
But at the end of this - companies who still mean their business in a serious way still be paying these money to get product they want.

[LeNNyfromNL]

There seems to be some hope for getting free ESXi in the future. Prashanth Shenoy, vice president of marketing for cloud platform, infrastructure and solutions mentioned this in a recent interview:

Shenoy said a free version will still be available on a limited basis to customers with demonstrated business needs, such as testing new features. “We are putting a program in place that we will unveil very soon to tell those people how they can [get a free version of ESXi] for running home labs, et cetera,” he said.

Source:
https://siliconangle.com/2024/02/14/vmw ... e-changes/

[dkvello]

There's always VMUG Advantage

[lucius_the]

I tried Proxmox VE and used it in my home lab environment for a year.
I then switched all production servers in my company to Proxmox VE - and never looked back.
Then I've switched half of my customers to Proxmox.

Proxmox is great because:
- has everything you need and more
- it's easy to update, much easier then ESXi
- supports clustering and HA, clustering is very easy to do
- doesn't need a special server for managing the cluster (it's replicated between nodes so you can use any node to manage the cluster)
- support LXC containers which is perhaps the best feature -> if you have apps running on Linux you can move away from VMs to OS containers very easily - and that uses far less resources.
- ZFS option especially can be useful in many scenarios
- built in firewall for VM-s and LXC-s is a great thing
- it's very lightweight, FAST and works perfectly fine even on older hardware (meaning you can keep the hypervisor up to date even if you don't have the latest server hardware)
- has a very good backup solution built-in (Proxmox backup server) that can do pretty much anything I need (including offsite backups)

Unfortunately that also means I'm not using Veeam for VM backups any more... Veeam has no support for Proxmox + Proxmox Backup Server has more than enough functionality (you can also use it fuzlly without subscription).

Notes:
- I'm not doing HA (but I can if I need to - and don't have to pay anything)
- Proxmox is basically debian Linux you will need some Linux knowledge, not everything can be done via GUI - that take some time and effort until you feel comfortable. Honestly now I see that as a big plus.

Bottom line: more than happy by making the switch from ESXi to PVE. Not thinking for a second about going back to ESXi or HyperV.

There. If you're thinking about Proxmox -> don't think too much. Go for it. Invest a few weeks in getting comfortable with Linux. You won't regret it.

[lucius_the]

Not to mention full support for CEPH and other advanced storage options - if you have more servers and can make use of that / want to give hyperconverged setup a try.
That is also included and can be used without paying for subscription -> subscription is completely optional.

[ITP-Stan]

- has a very good backup solution built-in (Proxmox backup server) that can do pretty much anything I need (including offsite backups)

- Can you restore a MS SQL database, or a specific point in time from transaction log backup?
- Can you restore an item from Active Directory?
- Is there File Level Restore wizard to original location on NTFS file system support?

I'm pretty the first 2 is a definite NO, and I guess the 3rd option might also be a NO.
I'm guessing you have to restore full VM, boot up in isolated network and than manually extract relevant data and try to put it backup to production manually.

[lucius_the]

Well first of all, this thread is obviously for people interested in free options.

You can't do PITR of MSSQL or any other database with PBS (Proxmox Backup Server). But I've never used Veeam for that either. Database is a workload inside a VM that is usually managed separately. I don't expect a VM-level backup tool to do these things - at least not as a primary function.

Same goes for Active Directory (also Oracle, PostgreSQL, etc). But for these things you actually need an Enterprise licence even with Veeam.

File-level restore works. You don't have to restore the whole VM.

[lucius_the]

In any case, you can do a lot with Proxmox for free. Probably more than you'd expect. And definitely much more than you can with free or Essentials ESXi licence (you need at least Essentials in order to back up ESXi btw). With vSphere Essentials you get less than what Proxmox gives for free.

And let's be fair. It's not really proper to compare features of enterprise-licenced vSphere + enterprise-licenced Veeam to a free Proxmox solution

[ITP-Stan]

Proxmox is a great product and offers for free enterprise functionality!
I love it for my homelab needs.

I was only responding to the statement about PBS doing everything that's needed.
I'm just saying that for business use PBS is not enough in my opinion.
And that's where I hope Veeam comes with a solution.

[lucius_the]

I agree, some users may need more functionality. If Veeam could add Proxmox support that would open up more options around backup.
But, the basic thing you get with PBS is fairly good - works, does deduplication and compression, has verify jobs, sync jobs, etc...

[ChuckS42]

There's always VMUG Advantage

Until they cancel that too.

[dkvello]

They won't

[ITP-Stan]

FYI there is another topic with discussion about support for Proxmox, where management says they might look into it.

ovirt-kvm-f62/feature-request-proxmox-t71691-90.html

[tgx]

We are moving to Nutanix. This was to be an expected Broadcom move. It will only get worse.

[Didi7]

Quote: We are moving to Nutanix. This was to be an expected Broadcom move. It will only get worse.

Sad! And that's expected behaviour with a move that Broadcom did!

After more than 5 years we move back to VMware (half time expensive than Nutanix) but we never fully migrated to Nutanix in all environments and we are open to new products like PROXMOX as well. It depends on how Broadcom moves and how PROXMOX might get supported by Veeam.

The future is bright or maybe not

[SkyDiver79]

I use Proxmox in the HCI HA cluster with Ceph for some customers.
The PBS file level restore works great, except when Dedup is activated in Windows.
For SQL and AD restores, I use Veeam Agent. You have two products again, but that doesn't feel so bad, because PBS backups are fully integrated in the hypervisor and you don't have to use an extra GUI.
I have also often used Veeam to migrate large HyperV VMs to Proxmox. Simply Instant Restore to an ESXi (also virtual) and mount the NFS mount in the Proxmox PVE. Then attach the VMDK to the VM and start it.
With Storage Migration you automatically change the disk format to the desired format in the target datastore.

[oliverL]

There's always VMUG Advantage

And then there also is Google.

[dpeach01]

I have to keep a small ESX cluster around for those unsupported VA's. They will probably work just fine in AHV/KVM, but the vendor won't support them. Other than that, VMware is toast. Nutanix runs everything, and the stack is so much more superior to VMWare now. 5 years ago, I hated AHV. Now I like it and the Nutanix stack is very powerful. They just need enough market share to get noticed by the rest of the industry. They also need some API's - as Veeam always tells me whenever I ask why Veeam One sucks so bad with Nutanix.. Probably won't take long now.

[FR8dawg]

It's hard to be too upset at a for profit business wanting to get paid for people using their product. That is how for profit businesses survive and bring us better and better solutions. Veeam wouldn't exist if they gave all of their products away.

That said, I would love them to continue providing a minimal ESXi product for free -- or a substantially reduced price. It is especially important for NFP (Not For Profit) organizations.

[kjstech]

We may move to Hyper-V... I'm not sure yet. Our renewal is in 2026 so we have a little time. We already pay for big MS Licensing anyway so we can run unlimited windows VMs (well as much as our compute can handle), so this Datacenter licence includes Hyper-V. Issue is, its Windows Server 2019 Datacenter, so in 2026 we'll likely want to upgrade.

The free ESXi keys still work. When you plug them in, nothing phone homes to check its validity. Its possible a vCenter server can ensure all its hosts have valid and UNIQUE keys, but standalone "Free version" servers don't do any of that. You could have a lab with 10 ESXi "Free versions" all using the same key for example. Free version doesn't work with vCenter anyway.

I'm going to play with Proxmox and XCP-ng just to feel it out. Nutanix looks nice, but we already invested a ton in storage arrays and blade servers. From what I know Nutainix is HCI, so you have to buy specific hardware.

[william.bishop]

New version of hyper-v in server 2025 is light years improved over the old one as is the server os itself...First time I've ever considered them to be even remotely close to vmware for functionality. We'll see how it all plays out, I'm fine with my licensing until 2026 as well...but if it continues to improve this may be my best option.

[MartinO]

Veeam wouldn't exist if they gave all of their products away.

Correct, but they have a feature-restricted free version (Veeam Agent or VBR Community Edition), which runs alongside the paid for versions. VMware did the same with ESXi. You couldn't use the vast majority of the features, and you had no support, but it was good enough for many.

[tgx]

I have started working with Nutanix CE for those of you looking for free versions of server class software.
I have done some simple migrations onto it and it works as you would expect. It's not easy to find the software
to download and the onboarding is a bit rough but I think it will work for most purposes on commodity hardware.
The interface GUI is very good and the architecture similar enough that any VMware user would feel at home.
We will be buying a Nutanix server and licensing it but if you want to play with the CE version you can find it here:

https://next.nutanix.com/discussion-for ... 417&fid=14

I do not know if CE is supported by Veeam, but I do know that they have Nutanix support.