> 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).

So it’s subscription or bust? Owch.

I really wonder how much longer the VMUG licensing is going to be around...

No more free at all? I learned virtualization w/ vmware gsx long before I ever had a company to use it at.. Oh well, vmwares irrelevant to me nowadays.

Wow, I knew things were getting really bad with VMWare, but I didn’t know they had got that bad… I liked ESXi, the free hypervisor was a good stepping stone to get people into the ecosystem and probably sold a lot of vSphere and vCenter licences down the line.

Very glad I decided to use Proxmox (as the Broadcom acquisition had been announced) for the small cluster we set up at our business a year ago, it’s been super stable, pretty easy to use but can do way more than I need (we’re not doing much that is that complicated yet)

I'm really worried who is going to handle network and raid going forward.

LSI was the standard for hardware raid, 3com and others big network names. Now they are Broadcom, which basically means:

* do as little as possible

* axe most support

* screw the little guy

* milk milk milk

* no real heavy R&D

This means, to me, that lots of hardware and software is being handled far less diligently than Boeing.

And that scares me.

Hardware RAID is much less of a necessity nowadays than it was before. There are multiple options for highly performant/redundant storage, be it localised to a single box or across multiple boxes (such as ZFS or Ceph).

Yes exactly, between ZFS and Ceph I'm not too worried - and at the bleeding edge, NVMe is just changing the game completely because the drives are becoming so fast that they need their own dedicated PCIe lanes, so you don't want to bottleneck it through an HBA in any case, and the HBA just increases access latency.

I think they will give up mindshare.

I use proxmox, which is hard to use but open. It is powerful, but you sort of have to be a sysadmin to climb the learning curve with it.

But I have lots of friends who are busy at home, but use vmware there. To them it is the same sort of "free" as proxmox.

They create an abstract model of vmware in their heads.

And when they're at work, they think of virtualization kinds of problems in terms of vmware. So at work, that's the tool they frequently reach for.