ESXi8 is now free again.. Really .. Bang and my last ESXi server has been decommisioned. Dropped off all my VMware books and materials at the recycler

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Captain Lukey

Captain Lukey

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Jun 16, 2024
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After 24+ Months in ESXi Turmoil… After following the ESXi saga over the last couple of years — and flirting with the idea of getting a VMUG subscription (aka I am a mug = $$$) — I finally pulled the plug on my last ESXi server and transitioned fully to Proxmox. Once I started looking at the actual costs of staying in the VMware ecosystem… it was downright eye-watering.

VMware Pricing.
  • VCF (VMware Cloud Foundation) – $350 per core.
  • VVEP (vSphere Essentials Plus) – 96-core pack, max 3 hosts, $35 per core. Includes vCenter.
    Total: $3,360
  • VVS (vSphere Standard) – $50 per core (minimum 16 cores per socket). Includes vCenter.
    Example: 2 hosts, 16 cores each = $1,600
  • VVF (vSphere Foundation) – $150 per core. Cost varies.
No wonder so many folks on the forums are jumping ship...

Around the World in 60 Days...

Head in the Clouds (As a Home User? Yeah, nah…)
I tried the cloud thing. Most services offer free tiers — 60 days to a year, or the occasional "always free" low-tier compute shapes (thanks, OCI). But let’s be real — there’s no such thing as a free lunch. Once I crunched the numbers, it was back to the drawing board.
I totally get the Enterprise "Utility model for enterprises services" - Autoscaling groups are my friend..

Save the Planet (and Some Power)
I picked up a simple, low-power server and started experimenting with:
  • Proxmox
  • XCP-ng
  • Hyper-V
  • oVirt
  • Nutanix CE
  • A little Ubuntu Multipass for lightweight Linux testing. (Linux-only setups? Totally worth a shot.)
The Good, the Bad, and the ProxMox

So far, Proxmox has done everything it promises on the tin.
I’ve got a healthy mix of:
  • LXC containers
  • Docker workloads
  • Windows Server. - I know this heading to the Azure cloud as less services are offered for on prem usage
  • And a VERY large buffet of Linux flavors: RH9, Ubuntu, Rocky Linux
Now i have dropped off all my VMware books and materials at the recycler — hopefully, they'll be reborn as paper coffee cups for future admins coming to the same realization.

So Here’s My Question:
Undertaking this around-the-world virtualization tour… have I missed anything? Is there software i have missed to replace ESXi? - Who knows...
 
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dioda

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Jan 19, 2022
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for home use and small businesses I think proxmox is perfect, if you need more than that there is harverster hci or openstack. Anyone who can migrate elsewhere from vmware ecosystem for trust management, so there is no reason to run it at home unless you are working for some huge bank or similar who are still stuck there because of volume.
 
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marcoi

marcoi

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Apr 6, 2013
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BTW VMware Workstation (free version) has issues now due to update services being removed. I went to run a VM on workstation that worked last week and it failed to run correctly yesterday. So I exported all my VMs off of workstation and into VirtualBox yesterday. So now i am completely off VMWARE at home.
 
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Captain Lukey

Captain Lukey

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Jun 16, 2024
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marcoi said:
BTW VMware Workstation (free version) has issues now due to update services being removed. I went to run a VM on workstation that worked last week and it failed to run correctly yesterday. So I exported all my VMs off of workstation and into VirtualBox yesterday. So now i am completely off VMWARE at home.
Click to expand...
100% VMware Workstation has also stopped working at nunber of places i know and has been
replaced now completely..
 
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kapone

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May 23, 2015
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Given VMware's insistence on not supporting old-ish (really, not that old, and perfectly functional and performant) hardware in any release after 6.7...because? Just because.

Moved away from ESXI a while ago and never looked back. There are other options. Yes, the migration to something else is kinda painful.
 
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Captain Lukey

Captain Lukey

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Jun 16, 2024
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The simplist way i found was to use the OVFTOOL for migration to move my VM's to Proxmox or K8s. - LXC - docker.
Open Virtualization Format (OVF) Tool

The export as OVF file
ovftool vi://username_on_esxi:YourPassword@esxihost//vm-name vm-name.ovf

To check as i wanted an OVF first. I then converted to OVA
ovftool vm-name.ovf vmname.ova

AND

Simple proxmox upload and import.
1746341659252.png

upload the new OVA and 99% check network and to ensure the NIC is the same and its a BIOS or UEFI boot.
1746341864330.png

Boot and go :) I am sure other people have even simplier ways.. I tried Vcenter to help but it cause me some issues.
 
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Greg_E

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Oct 10, 2024
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I'm told you can boot a Clonezilla ISO on each side, and do a machine to machine clone, but I haven't tried it yet. Also said to work physical to virtual and from XYZ hypervisor to ABC hypervisor, kind of agnostic.
 
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Jason Antes

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Feb 28, 2020
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I tried all of those as well as Harvester. Only Harvester and Proxmox made the cut for me. At first I was running Harvester, seemed pretty decent but a node update caused it to lose everything (1 node cluster). Also, backups were a little more "old school" with Harvester since I couldn't find a solution that integrated with it for cheap/free. Luckily everything important was backed up twice anyway. After that I transitioned to Proxmox and their backup server. So far been running good on it and have gotten used to it's quirks. Still like VMWare's consoles better by far (Harvester's was better too).

For other's looking at work and who run RHEL, look into OpenStack. I was going to transition to that at my place of employment before layoffs hit. Not only was it far cheaper to license than esxi, but it's premium support was cheaper than our RHEL instance support and would cover every instance of RHEL under it too.
 
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Captain Lukey

Captain Lukey

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Jason Antes said:
I tried all of those as well as Harvester. Only Harvester and Proxmox made the cut for me. At first I was running Harvester, seemed pretty decent but a node update caused it to lose everything (1 node cluster). Also, backups were a little more "old school" with Harvester since I couldn't find a solution that integrated with it for cheap/free. Luckily everything important was backed up twice anyway. After that I transitioned to Proxmox and their backup server. So far been running good on it and have gotten used to it's quirks. Still like VMWare's consoles better by far (Harvester's was better too).

For other's looking at work and who run RHEL, look into OpenStack. I was going to transition to that at my place of employment before layoffs hit. Not only was it far cheaper to license than esxi, but it's premium support was cheaper than our RHEL instance support and would cover every instance of RHEL under it too.
Click to expand...
Great to hear your experience mirrors mine, Jason! I also ran Harvester and Proxmox side by side for a while—hosting K8s, Docker, and LXC containers. Recently, I migrated everything to Proxmox and, like you, rely on ProxBackup Server for backups.

I’ve since switched off Harvester (it’s a cool product!) because I noticed slower performance on certain workloads and more patches to manage. Simplicity wins for me too! ;)
 
Captain Lukey

Captain Lukey

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Jun 16, 2024
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Greg_E said:
Harvester seems a bit young, and maybe not the best for regular VM needs.
Click to expand...
With harvester, I was checking out multithreaded workloads with htop and it does consume around 8% more cpu cycles, its a great product and very young in its development but very cool. Proxmox now seems to have addressed and fixed, passthrough and even has now got amazing memory ballon options that work.
 
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