I’d expected this but it still sucks.
There are two kinds of datacenter admins, those who aren’t using VMWare, and those who are migrating away from VMWare.
Regrettably, there is currently no substitute product offered.
I really don’t think you regret a God damn thing broadcom.
If you’re already running windows, hyper-v. theres proxmox, and tons of others. So they are mistaken. 🤣
They mean that they aren’t offering another solution.
I know, but this is the way I read it when they claim to give no option.
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.
FWIW, I run proxmox at home, and I friggin love it. It’s really not hard at all.
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!
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)
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.
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.
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.
You know, you can recommend lxd and whatever without putting out FUD about proxmox and other tech.
While I get your point… I kind of can’t: https://lemmy.world/comment/7476411
What about Proxmox makes its license questionable?
Nothing that is more questionable than lxd, which now requires a contributor license agreement, allowing canonical to not open source their hosted versions, despite lxd being agpl.
Thankfully, it’s been forked as incus, and debian is encouraging users to migrate.
But yeah. They haven’t said what makes proxmox’s license questionable.
Thankfully, it’s been forked as incus, and debian is encouraging users to migrate.
Yes, the people running the original LXC and LXD projects under Canonical now work on Incus under the Linux Containers initiative. Totally insulated from potential Canonical BS. :)
The move from LXD to Incus should be transparent as it guarantees compatibility for now. But even if you install Debian 12 today and LXD from the Debian repository you’re already insulated from Canonical.
First they’re always nagging you to get a subscription. Then they make system upgrades harder for free customers. Then the gatekeep you from the enterprise repositories in true RedHat fashion and have important fixes from the
pve-no-subscriptionrepository multiple times.As long as the source code is freely available, that’s entirely congruent with GPL, which is one of the most stringent licenses. You can lay a lot of criticism on their business practices, and I would not deploy this on my home server, but it haven’t seen any evidence that they’re infringing any licenses.
Okay if you want to strictly look at licenses per si no issues there. But the rest of what I described I believe we can agree is very questionable, takes into questionable open-source.
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…
I need full on segregated machines sometimes though. I’ve got stuff that only runs in Win98 or XP (old radio programming software).
Do you work for a railroad? That sounds too familiar.
Lol no, just old radios. My point is just that my requirements are pretty widely varied.
I’m curious what radio software you use that has these requirements?
Old Motorolas, they really hate users.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
Yay… Capitalism…
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.
Its not capitalism it just is business. No one is making you use it.
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.
Bummer. Oh well, good thing I’m learning proxmox eh.
I’m shocked I tell you; simply shocked…
ESXi sucks
Have you ever used it?
I don’t own an IBM mainframe so.
Hopefully everyone migrated.
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?
Hyper-v is definitely wisely used…
Lots of hypervisors support windows. Ie proxmox
To be pedantic - KVM is the hypervisor. Proxmox is a wrapper to it.
Being even more pedantic, KVM is the hypervisor, QEMU is a wrapper around it and Proxmox provides a management interface to it.
Fair enough
