VMware ends support for free ESXi
Broadcom STRIKES again!
A couple of days ago, VMware announced that the free version of VMware’s vSphere Hypervisor, also known as ESXi, is being discontinued.
This product was not really used many organizations, but it will be a significant impact to hobbyist and tech tinkers, and folks with home labs who were not already migrated to alternative products like XCP, ProxMox and of course Microsoft’s Hyper-V.
ESXi is what is known as a “bare-metal hypervisor,” lightweight software that runs directly on hardware without requiring a separate operating system layer in between. ESXi allows you to split a PC’s physical resources (CPUs and CPU cores, RAM, storage, networking components, and so on) among multiple virtual machines. ESXi also supports passthrough for PCI, SATA, and USB accessories, allowing guest operating systems direct access to components like graphics cards and hard drives. ( Thank you Copilot for this summary!)
I have been using ProxMox for my home lab and I love it! – I can do almost anything with it! Amazing open-source product!
