Since Broadcom’s $61 billion acquisition of VMware closed in November 2023, Broadcom has been charging ahead with major changes to the company’s personnel and products. In December, Broadcom began laying off thousands of employees and stopped selling perpetually licensed versions of VMware products, pushing its customers toward more stable and lucrative software subscriptions instead. In January, it ended its partner programs, potentially disrupting sales and service for many users of its products.
This week, Broadcom is making a change that is smaller in scale but possibly more relevant for home users of its products: The free version of VMware’s vSphere Hypervisor, also known as ESXi, is being discontinued.
Well shit. ESXi was the best way to build a home lab when studying for the professional certifications I need.
Proxmox?
Proxmox is a good option for home labs (in my opinion) but it sucks if your workplace utilizes VMWare (or a product limited to VMWare) and you want practice at home
I haven’t worked with it before. The product is only supported on VMWare hypervisors, so no matter what, I’ll have to build on an unsupported setup, but I was leaning towards KVM for familiarity. I will make sure to check Proxmox out too though.
Check out XCP-ng. Open source, enterprise grade bare metal hypervisor.
I moved from ESXi to it about a year ago, it’s been solid. Lots of documentation and support from the community. Lawrence Systems has a ton of great videos on configuring it, both simple and advanced.
Which enterprise is using XCP-ng?
Large portions of IBM, Rackspace, Alibaba, Oracle, and AWS’s cloud infrastructure are powered by the Xen Project hypervisor, which is the core of the XCP-ng stack.