ESXi free 8.0 seems to be the last one !

I wonder if existing licenses for esxi 7,esxi 8 will stop activating after x date
 
It's sad the major players are doing this, hiding behind a paywall for home lab especially. VMware overhauling licensing and core requirements. Nutanix now hides behind a business email account for CE registration.

From the business side, VMware/Broadcom seem to be pushing out their smaller customers. Even their VVF is quite expensive. If you go VCF, a hard requirement is vSAN so using existing hardware is most likely out. If you decide to start with VFF and later want to upgrade to VCF, you can't today. It would be a full replace.

Comparison:
https://williamlam.com/2024/01/what...f-and-vmware-cloud-foundation-vcf-offers.html
 
Most software is free.
I understand the costs involved with making and managing these things, its a pity we cant land somewhere in between everyone must pay for us to live on yachts, and starving developer maintaining software and living in a sewer.

I also understand why we cant. own guns, know how to grow food, and eat things you kill. etc.

I'm super curious how we survive off this planet. cause literally this is how most people live here.
 
I've been running a free esxi install on my desktops and servers for fun, looks like it's about time to get back onto proxmox.

With that said the esxi trial license is basically indefinite and has no limits as far as running vms so I can see alot of people abusing the free license (most of which wouldn't be willing to pay)
 
Vengance_01 said:
Good riddens.
Click to expand...

Okay genuine question because this the probably 10th time, not from you, I've seen this in the last few weeks in multiple places. Are you trying to say good riddance and just don't know any better or this some new perversion like "on accident" or something else completely?
 
Nicklebon said:
Okay genuine question because this the probably 10th time, not from you, I've seen this in the last few weeks in multiple places. Are you trying to say good riddance and just don't know any better or this some new perversion like "on accident" or something else completely?
Click to expand...
Auto correct and spell check defeated?
 
travm said:
Auto correct and spell check defeated?
Click to expand...
Typing in ridda results in riddance being suggested on every device I tried so ... probably not. I'm honestly leaning towards this being deliberate which is just sad.
 
cdabc123 said:
...it's about time to get back onto proxmox.
Click to expand...

Well, I dont have enough time but have played with proxmox. While it is "nice", it seemed like freenas... setting up the drive, etc. and pure overhead for me.
i prefer the esxi way as it was really nice and easy...

BUT my big gripe with esxi - in 6.7, my connectx-1 and connectx-2 cards are supported but in esxi 7 no.
I know it isnt just esxi... same goes with freenas and proxmox.
I would change everything out and redo my network but not sure what to replace it all with.
my connectx cards use the cx4 plug...
DEM-CB100QXS-510x600.jpg
i have my esxi go into an hp procurve 6400cl cx4 connector 6 port switch.
1 port of procurve into back of a brocade ironport 648s then out to the internet.
I have a 6 port poe switch driving my reolink 4k cameras....
the 48 ports is overkill for me as I am using maybe 15....

anyway - back on track....

I want to check out Hyper-V to see if my NIC's are supported as I have them running in my win10 plex box, win11 test box and my server 2022 file server.
 
What is the attraction of VMware products at this point? (if you are not fortune 500)
 
Great news... this has now pushed me to work on getting my VMs over to Hyper-v...
Stoked and esxi that doesnt support my nic can go buhbuy
 

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TeleFragger said:
BUT my big gripe with esxi - in 6.7, my connectx-1 and connectx-2 cards are supported but in esxi 7 no.
I know it isnt just esxi... same goes with freenas and proxmox.
I would change everything out and redo my network but not sure what to replace it all with.
my connectx cards use the cx4 plug...

i have my esxi go into an hp procurve 6400cl cx4 connector 6 port switch.
1 port of procurve into back of a brocade ironport 648s then out to the internet.
I have a 6 port poe switch driving my reolink 4k cameras....
the 48 ports is overkill for me as I am using maybe 15....

anyway - back on track....

I want to check out Hyper-V to see if my NIC's are supported as I have them running in my win10 plex box, win11 test box and my server 2022 file server.
Click to expand...
Well first off, you should not be using "freenas" any more, you should of upgraded to TrueNAS...that may help...
https://www.truenas.com/community/threads/do-mellanox-connectx-2-work-with-freenas-11.61143/

You could also just buy some newer X3 cards or Chelsio and be done with it. Also for my any DACS I use are 10GTEK ones off amazon, work great with my intel x520's and Brocade ICX,.

ESXi7 moved to signed drivers and ditched many older drivers, you can add the drivers into the iso for install for it to work though if you can find them,
 
Outlaw85 said:
It's sad the major players are doing this, hiding behind a paywall for home lab especially. VMware overhauling licensing and core requirements. Nutanix now hides behind a business email account for CE registration.

From the business side, VMware/Broadcom seem to be pushing out their smaller customers. Even their VVF is quite expensive. If you go VCF, a hard requirement is vSAN so using existing hardware is most likely out. If you decide to start with VFF and later want to upgrade to VCF, you can't today. It would be a full replace.

Comparison:
https://williamlam.com/2024/01/what...f-and-vmware-cloud-foundation-vcf-offers.html
Click to expand...
VMware SA here. Best bet for home lab is VMUG Advantage, about $180 a year for the full VCF/EUC stack for non-prod use.

VCF only has a hard requirement to deploy vSAN for the SDDCM Management domain, workload domains can use external SAN or vSAN. Also, you don't have to deploy SDDCM - you can just deploy ala carte as before since we're just shipping you individual product licensing keys. This is fully supported.
 
By the way, there is a LOT of incorrect information floating around - if you have any questions and want to know the truth from someone who actually works for VMware, I'm happy to help. I can (and do) also take what is being said in the community back to the business so that they can adapt as they see fit. I can't guarantee that any one particular thing would change, but I've already seen us being much more agile from a feature request perspective.
 
SGalbincea said:
VMware SA here. Best bet for home lab is VMUG Advantage, about $180 a year for the full VCF/EUC stack for non-prod use.

VCF only has a hard requirement to deploy vSAN for the SDDCM Management domain, workload domains can use external SAN or vSAN. Also, you don't have to deploy SDDCM - you can just deploy ala carte as before since we're just shipping you individual product licensing keys. This is fully supported.
Click to expand...

Maybe we didn't get the full details at the time, or I missed something, which is completely possible. I do know from a small-med business perspective, this "either or" install is going to hurt business that aren't running compliant hardware for ESXi and have to buy a stack to run it. For example, running ESXi over Nutanix, my understanding is that we would need to get the vSAN stack to stay compliant with the new licensing model and run vCenter. From the slide deck/s I've seen these are the only two options going forward. This combined with feeling from VMware Explore, the new focus is "Enterprise, screw the little guy". Talking to several people there, including some VMware employees, I wasn't the only one thinking this.

If my understanding is incorrect, please do correct me. If we don't have to buy a management stack just to use ESXi/vCenter, that would be great. Our current plan is to get the "cheapest one" which we are told is VCF because the al-a-carte days are mostly gone.

I have VMUG Advantage but haven't looked up how this will affect me running a home lab going forward since I don't have a "vSAN configuration" running. This is the part I need to look up to see if it's worth keeping around.
 
uOpt said:
What is the attraction of VMware products at this point? (if you are not fortune 500)
Click to expand...
IMHO, there was never an attraction, UNLESS you were targeting working at a big company that used VMware. Or you were living in the past (circa 2000 or so).

If you wanted that "enterprise feel" without the cost (talking a being stuck in the past), I would have run something Xen based (talking before we had qemu+kvm).
 
cjcox said:
IMHO, there was never an attraction, UNLESS you were targeting working at a big company that used VMware. Or you were living in the past (circa 2000 or so).

If you wanted that "enterprise feel" without the cost (talking a being stuck in the past), I would have run something Xen based (talking before we had qemu+kvm).
Click to expand...
our company tried kvm but didnt quite like it and switched over to VMWare...
I was not on the team so I do not know what they did not like...
 
uOpt said:
What is the attraction of VMware products at this point? (if you are not fortune 500)
Click to expand...
well for a home lab or work lab, it just worked great... I broke proxmox too many times and being a winderz guy... yeah, that didnt go well with proxmox.. lost everything a few times.
but that is me...
 
MrGuvernment said:
Well first off, you should not be using "freenas" any more, you should of upgraded to TrueNAS...that may help...
https://www.truenas.com/community/threads/do-mellanox-connectx-2-work-with-freenas-11.61143/

You could also just buy some newer X3 cards or Chelsio and be done with it. Also for my any DACS I use are 10GTEK ones off amazon, work great with my intel x520's and Brocade ICX,.

ESXi7 moved to signed drivers and ditched many older drivers, you can add the drivers into the iso for install for it to work though if you can find them,
Click to expand...
i will check it out.. got an old hp z420 sitting here...
 
TeleFragger said:
our company tried kvm but didnt quite like it and switched over to VMWare...
I was not on the team so I do not know what they did not like...
Click to expand...
Again, companies are different. Enterprise use cases can be complex, more complex than one would usually find "at home". And again, running VMware "at home" because it's what your company uses, is a case of why you'd try running it "at home".
 
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Outlaw85 said:
Maybe we didn't get the full details at the time, or I missed something, which is completely possible. I do know from a small-med business perspective, this "either or" install is going to hurt business that aren't running compliant hardware for ESXi and have to buy a stack to run it. For example, running ESXi over Nutanix, my understanding is that we would need to get the vSAN stack to stay compliant with the new licensing model and run vCenter. From the slide deck/s I've seen these are the only two options going forward. This combined with feeling from VMware Explore, the new focus is "Enterprise, screw the little guy". Talking to several people there, including some VMware employees, I wasn't the only one thinking this.

If my understanding is incorrect, please do correct me. If we don't have to buy a management stack just to use ESXi/vCenter, that would be great. Our current plan is to get the "cheapest one" which we are told is VCF because the al-a-carte days are mostly gone.

I have VMUG Advantage but haven't looked up how this will affect me running a home lab going forward since I don't have a "vSAN configuration" running. This is the part I need to look up to see if it's worth keeping around.
Click to expand...
  1. Always run ESXi on supported hardware in production. For home lab have at it.
  2. You can still run ESXi as the hypervisor and use Nutanix for the HCI storage layer, this is supported, although I don't know why you would do this vs. vSAN as it is less expensive, simpler, and easily outperforms AOS. Also, having your HCI storage depend on CVMs living in user space is a hack IMO vs. vSAN which operates at the ESXi kernel level. (I am obviously biased)
  3. There are four options - VCF, vSphere Foundation, vSphere Standard, and vSphere Essentials Plus
  4. Nobody here at VMware in my sphere (haha) is saying "screw the little guy." Nobody. I can imagine that someone who was let go during the merger could have that sentiment, but even at the Strategic level we are doing our best to help folks of all sizes figure out what is best for their organization. While I cover very large accounts, there are many smaller agencies/departments/campuses within them that need to figure this out. I am confident that we will be able to take care of them all.
  5. vSphere Standard is just ESXi Standard and vCenter Standard - if you don't need the Enterprise Plus feature set of ESXi then this is the solution for you.
  6. Again, you only have to deploy and use vSAN if you deploy the full VCF stack, which requires a Management domain.
Hope this helps!
 
That sucks the free version seems to be gone going forward, but in reality if you want to really test out the capabilities, just get VMUG like stated above. A single host barely scratches the surface. Sure you can create some VM's and some host networking stuff, but the learning potential kind of hits a wall fast. I shill VMUG pretty hard because its very affordable for what you get. I just re-upped my sub to put my lab back together. I also will be trying out Hyper-V also to broaden my experience. I got my VCP-DCV last March and having a full lab environment stood up how I have seen in production environments helped immensely and also exploring additional features as well. I would like to get the VCAP, but might be more worth while to get more experience with Hyper-V, Azure and AWS.
 
TeleFragger said:
Great news... this has now pushed me to work on getting my VMs over to Hyper-v...
Stoked and esxi that doesnt support my nic can go buhbuy
Click to expand...
Hyper-V sucks indescribably compared to VMWare.
1. It puts the host OS on top of the hypervisor which kills performance of the host machine, even without any VMs running.
2. It really, really, really, really sucks if you need an XP VM.
a. Color depth is jacked
b. It is very, very unstable. So unstable that it locks up or completely fails to be able to show anything on screen and the only way to get back into it is to power off the VM.

Those are the biggest huge issues I have with it. I gave up on it after dealing with those two insanely major issues.
 
I wonder if i could run x86 Windows under qemu on big Endian Linux on PowerVM.
 
cyclone3d said:
Hyper-V sucks indescribably compared to VMWare.
1. It puts the host OS on top of the hypervisor which kills performance of the host machine, even without any VMs running.
2. It really, really, really, really sucks if you need an XP VM.
a. Color depth is jacked
b. It is very, very unstable. So unstable that it locks up or completely fails to be able to show anything on screen and the only way to get back into it is to power off the VM.

Those are the biggest huge issues I have with it. I gave up on it after dealing with those two insanely major issues.
Click to expand...
Sounds more like a "you" issue as in trying to run it on improper hardware of configuration. I know of clients who run several Hyper-V hosts and run their critical infra on top of it with out issues...

Now, I am a vmware person at heart, VMware did hyper-visors properly, MS Hyper-V was a hack job and sucked compared to vSphere for years. The network stack and configuration options in Hyper-V sucked, backup tools could not integrate well at a enterprise level.

Sure, Hyper-V has gotten TONS better over the years, but it is still an MS half baked product. Go KVM or Xen if you cant do VMware. Promox, sure lots talk about it, but how many actual enterprises are running proxmox? If they could run promox,. they likely could safely run Hyper-V as well, since promox is just a pretty UI for KVM/Qemu basically.
 
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Stugots said:
Seems like Broadcom is eager to join the likes of Redhat and Oracle in pissing off the community as a whole.
Click to expand...
It is the Broadcom play book, they planned it this way, come in, cut jobs, tighten up things, throw away the low hanging fruit and make sure their top customers continue to be locked into their eco-system so even if they wanted to leave, they could not. it is why VCF was offered at 50% off, get more people onboard now, and then watch as renewal costs start to creep up to hit the profit margins Broadcom claimed they would have in no time..
 
MrGuvernment said:
It is the Broadcom play book, they planned it this way, come in, cut jobs, tighten up things, throw away the low hanging fruit and make sure their top customers continue to be locked into their eco-system so even if they wanted to leave, they could not. it is why VCF was offered at 50% off, get more people onboard now, and then watch as renewal costs start to creep up to hit the profit margins Broadcom claimed they would have in no time..
Click to expand...
Broadcom also bought Altiris from Symantec.... and now they are tightening up their belts on us. we need a quote for yearly maintenance and they want 3 years right now! they figure if they lock us in, we cant go anywhere... problem is we do not have the budget set for this.
 
Yeh, discussions here about moving from altiris to Microsoft's system.
Our side of the mouse uses altiris, but everywhere else in the company uses Microsoft.
Sucks because we have it all customized and working great: custom web page to submit a Mac address on, then pick locations, dept, domain, build type, software template, then add any additional admin accounts to the end machine, add any software from the list of packages (several hundred overall).
Works in all the offices in the US, Mexico and Europe with (1) win 10 ltsc image on laptops, desktops and workstations on over like 20 build types.
Same system for server builds, except those have to be pxe booted into the system before they can show on the build pick screen (security, so a disgruntled employee couldn't submit a job for rebuilding all the DC's)
Would suck to redo all that
 
Hmm I'll have to grab a couple more recent versions soon then. Looking to update my esxi hardware in my home setup. Either way I definitely got my money worth out of the i5-2400s. I also know 2/3 data stores are at least 8 year old spinners, probably more.

1000003876.jpg
 
Anyone use or have used Cockpit? Seems like a pretty neat system management interface, might be good on a stripped down arch install.

Edit: Handy article discussing installing cockpit on Archlinux.
 
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MrGuvernment said:
Sounds more like a "you" issue as in trying to run it on improper hardware of configuration. I know of clients who run several Hyper-V hosts and run their critical infra on top of it with out issues...

Now, I am a vmware person at heart, VMware did hyper-visors properly, MS Hyper-V was a hack job and sucked compared to vSphere for years. The network stack and configuration options in Hyper-V sucked, backup tools could not integrate well at a enterprise level.

Sure, Hyper-V has gotten TONS better over the years, but it is still an MS half baked product. Go KVM or Xen if you cant do VMware. Promox, sure lots talk about it, but how many actual enterprises are running proxmox? If they could run promox,. they likely could safely run Hyper-V as well, since promox is just a pretty UI for KVM/Qemu basically.
Click to expand...
I 100% agree with this. We run two HyperV HA Clusters connected to a SAN in production with none of these issues. All of our IT guys also are running HyperV in their homelabs and are also having none of the problems listed.
We also run Proxmox in production. We have it on a 4 CPU server and it runs Splunk on prem. I felt better about using proxmox over HyperV for ZFS and because its all linux VMs and felt it was more optimal then running linux vms on HyperV. We also run proxmox backup server along with it on another server. We pay them for support that weve never used. Ive had the option of saving the money but keep paying for it to help support the project.
 
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