ESXi free 8.0 seems to be the last one (now free again)!

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WANg

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Jun 10, 2018
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XCP-ng + Xen Orchestra for web based use/management of multiple hosts is one of the easiest/cleanest experiences I've had with a hypervisor - and handling 3-2-1 backups to offsite storage as well. The kernel you're talking about is just the dom0 management/advisory VM, xen itself is running on bare hardware, and the advisory VM (dom0) is not on bleeding edge kernels for a reason (it doesn't need to be, for starters). works great on any x86 hardware I've tried it on

View attachment 36155

Can proxmox even manage multiple servers (not clustered) from a single UI yet?
Now try running that XCP-ng on something like a Framework 13 Gen 2 board (with an Alder Lake), a Lenovo EliteDesk m75q gen 2 (with a Ryzen 5650) or an XPS15 9750 (Intel iGPU and nVidia GeForce GTX1050M) what I usually use to prototype hypervisors), and you'll find yourself run into multiple issues. Let's start with not having it freak out if it's on the Alder Lake FW13 gen 3 board (probably more of a Framework firmware issue, but seems okay for Proxmox and ESXi 6), or it crashes on the 8.2 installer on the m75q-2 (not sure if it's a hardware thing, but I didn't see that on Proxmox or ESXi 6), or I need to use at least 2 nightly ISOs in order for the VGA console on the XPS15 to even show up. I also had to deal with Secureboot not being a thing on their installer ISOs until relatively recently.

It also doesn't like having a USB NIC (configured as an admin interface) come up correctly on reboots without manual intervention (which is pretty important since you can't administer it if it keeps spawning as a new NIC instead of realizing it's the same NIC...or reordering the NICs so the admin interface comes up somewhere else). I mean, yeah, it's dom0, but it's also the admin entry point for the virtualization node. I have to manually put in an init.d rule on the dom0 image to make the device assignment persist. If this is an environment where I expect others to follow-up, I'll have to make sure that this quirk is documented somewhere and this setting is saved somewhere...it's not something that I need to do out of the box on ESXi 6 or Proxmox.

Oh yeah, and unlike XCP-ng or XenServer, you don't need to run an orchestration VM on the hypervisor to administer the resources attached.
Is that still a thing? If dom0 doesn't even come up correctly with the network settings, how useful is that orchestration VM?

Also, what's the use-case for being able to admin multiple non-related hypervisors under the same roof for a non-production setup, anyways?
 
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Cdude

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Jun 18, 2024
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My first message so bare with me ;)

A while ago I bought a NUC and as I was preparing to free some time to start learning ESXi ....end of story.
But....I found most if not all ISO on a site so my question is : can I still use install and use these?

VMWare.PNG
 

Sacrilego

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Jun 23, 2016
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My first message so bare with me ;)

A while ago I bought a NUC and as I was preparing to free some time to start learning ESXi ....end of story.
But....I found most if not all ISO on a site so my question is : can I still use install and use these?
Only for about 60 days without a license.

Unless you obtained a free license key before the discontinuation, you can't use it beyond the 60-day trial period.

Your best bet would be to get the Vmug Advantage Membership if you want to learn esxi and more legally.

There are "other" ways, but it's best not to discuss them here.
 
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pricklypunter

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Yea, I would second that, VMUG is def the legal way to go and gives you access to all the goodies. At this point though, unless there's a real pressing reason to go with ESXi, maybe learning for work or something, I would hop on the Proxmox gravy train for home lab stuff. I just don't think ESXi will ever be the same again, the party is well and truly over for them regards to the little guy, unless they pull some sort of rabbit out the hat :)
 

MountainBofh

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Mar 9, 2024
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Outside of the mega corps, I think VMware is the walking dead. Businesses are dumping it like mad due the insane price increases.
 

Cdude

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Jun 18, 2024
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Thanx everybody for your quick feedback.

To summarize : Pay 210€/year or Proxmox for free
 

Cdude

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Jun 18, 2024
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Besides ProxMox , is this a good alternative?

I'm looking to practice nested VM's in particular
 

TRACKER

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Jan 14, 2019
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Besides ProxMox , is this a good alternative?

I'm looking to practice nested VM's in particular
Nutanix does not support remote storage (e.g. iscsi), only local (HCI).
 
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WANg

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Oh god no please don’t - you are better off registering as a Citrix partner for XenServer than continuing down the VMWare Flavorade path.

Who knows how long Broadcom is planning to let you have access to ESXi, or if they lock down update/patch servers and all the un-fun stuff. When they migrated off the old Linux based kernel during the 6.x-> 7 rollover and threw a bunch of legacy hardware under the bus, it was already a good time to get out as home labbers. Even before the Broadcom takeover they were getting increasingly less and less pleasant to deal with as time goes on. When Broadcom bought them out it just made it more urgent to do so. If you already got out of VMWare, don’t get back in. If you were never in it, don’t get in now unless you have massive incentives to do so (like your job mandates you using it).
 
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zachj

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Apr 17, 2019
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The new free version of ESXi comes with a built-in perpetual license…in that specific way it’s actually better than the old free version (for which one needed to register to get a license and then apply it).

Broadcom already locked down the update/patch servers as of April 2025; one now needs a registered user account that has a license entitlement in order to gain access to the servers because they’ve forced authentication on the servers. To achieve this they’ve updated lifecycle manager in vcenter and in vCF Manager to solicit ones portal auth token.
 

gea

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Dec 31, 2010
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So this means that for any security update you need to rerun a newer free ESXi installer if available?
 

zachj

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Apr 17, 2019
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So this means that for any security update you need to rerun a newer free ESXi installer if available?
Unclear…I would guess the answer is yes based solely on the fact that when you look at the portal they haven’t provided a patch ISO or zip file to download.

they’ve already locked down the patch/update repos to require an with token so that route won’t work unless you’ve got a portal user who has license entitlement.

I’m going to guess you can probably download the latest ISO and boot from it and it’ll detect an existing installation and prompt whether you want to clean install or update.

im also going to guess that bcom will have decided to treat this as a new product and if you attempt to use the download to update an existing installation it’ll complain that they’re incompatible.
 

Greg_E

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Oct 10, 2024
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Limitations (from what I've heard) are also 8 logical processors and there might be a RAM limit. That kind of means you might as well just use that HP T740 or an n305 computer for this and save a little power. For a lab I'm OK with that, you can do a lot in a lab with these limitations.
 

WANg

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Unclear…I would guess the answer is yes based solely on the fact that when you look at the portal they haven’t provided a patch ISO or zip file to download.

they’ve already locked down the patch/update repos to require an with token so that route won’t work unless you’ve got a portal user who has license entitlement.

I’m going to guess you can probably download the latest ISO and boot from it and it’ll detect an existing installation and prompt whether you want to clean install or update.

im also going to guess that bcom will have decided to treat this as a new product and if you attempt to use the download to update an existing installation it’ll complain that they’re incompatible.
If you got the entitlement token already then MAYBE they won’t push for a support contract for updates, but I would not put it past Broadcom to throw you under the bus at a later date.

The more useful question is…why go into/stick with standalone ESXi 8 if given a choice, then? If you are running single-node any common hypervisor will do whether it’s open source free (proxmox, XCPng, Debian with xen/qemu) or free to use (HyperV/XenServer either via MSN or Citrix’s partnership program respectively)…it’s not like ESXi 8 has any must-have killer features that draws new users in, or the UI is so much better or easier for newbies to pick up the trade versus the others. If you need multi-node for messing with VMotion you’ll need to get a VCenter license anyways.
Then there’s that entire situation with ESXi 7+ requiring the use of supported hardware (which for an older lab or one that is Ryzen Pro APUs (which includes the t740) based means dealing with Realtek NICs (since those support the PRO features, whatever that means, I have yet to see them work)), and that's not supported. You'll need USB NICs and fling drivers can be hairy. That lack of hardware support is a major disincentive to work on them.

If you have ESXi 6.x entitlements on existing hardware (like me), hold onto the hypervisor and use it to practice the useful skill of migrating VMs off VMWare infra…but unless your job requires it, don’t even bother going into 7 or 8. Hell, even the act of grabbing ESXi 7 or 8 will put your contact info on some Broadcom SDR's cold call stack, so no thanks. Chances are, those companies who renewed with Broadcom despite the price increases are either beholden to them, got a much better deal through bundling with other products acquired from their past buyouts (like anything Computer Associates related) to the point where it is not worth looking (yet), or are using the renewal to buy time while working on a migration plan (or as leverage to get a better deal out of Citrix or Oracle or IBM or Microsoft or whatever). If you work for / made your career out of mid-size or startups you and your peers will probably avoid VMWare nowadays anyways. Whatever goodwill Broadcom got from allowing the Videocore ASICs to be bundled onto Raspberry Pis and giving away most of its trade secrets, they are more than offset by the binary blob lockdowns of their other ASICs (their ethernet switching hardware / Wifi chips) and the VMWare shenanigans.
 
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zachj

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Apr 17, 2019
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For those of us who have a legit ESXi 8 free license (before bcom shut it down) the reason I’m still interested in the availability of the new free version is updates/patches.

Since they locked down the update site the only viable way to get patches is to download the new free ISO and hope bcom didn’t needlessly break that as an update path.
 

Greg_E

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Oct 10, 2024
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Using this as a patch might break whatever license you already have, which is why I haven't applied it to my VMUG Advantage licensed hosts. Yes I think they would do this on purpose as they seem to hate VMUG Advantage users, or at least they aren't doing us any favors.