News of the offering emerged in a throwaway line in the Release Notes for version 8.0 Update 3e of the Broadcom business unit’s ESXi hypervisor.
Just below the “What’s New” section of that document is the statement: “Broadcom makes available the VMware vSphere Hypervisor version 8, an entry-level hypervisor. You can download it free of charge from the Broadcom Support portal.”
We’ve asked VMware for details about the new release and its capabilities, but no further information was available at the time of writing.
VMware offered a free version of ESXi for years, and it was beloved by home lab operators and vAdmins who needed something to tinker with. But in February 2024, VMware discontinued it on grounds that it was dropping perpetual licenses and moving to subscriptions.
If you want to try the hypervisor, you’ll need to be registered with Broadcom’s customer support portal to download it. Sadly, our virtualization desk’s home lab is not currently operational, so while we’ve downloaded the ISO file, we haven’t been able to get it running. Suffice it to say, it doesn’t want to run nested inside a desktop hypervisor.
Broadcom hasn’t explained why it has reversed its decision, but it’s not hard to guess.
VMware shops and partners of all sizes might need test or training environments, but as Broadcom only sells subscriptions (and greatly favors three-year terms) there’s no cheap way to access Virtzilla’s code. A modest freebie makes it more likely the vCurious will do some tinkering that turns into a sale. Free editions are also a way of building a talent pool.
VMware’s rivals know this. Nutanix has had a free Community Edition for years and Platform9 announced a free edition of its own a couple of weeks back. Other VMware competitors are open source, so their code is always free.
While VMware has made its Workstation desktop hypervisor free, it lacked a no-cost server virtualization option. Now it’s back in the game.
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Source: VMware revives its free ESXi hypervisor • The Register
Robin Edgar
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