Free ESXi is dead, long live Proxmox!
Free ESXi is dead, long live Proxmox!
I have been using ESXi for a very long time. After the recent Broadcom buyout of VMware, I braced for the inevitable squeeze, this story is nothing new. Having attended a few VMware events in my career, I can say that I always thought VMware had a decent culture, one which I am sure has been torn down for good. The discontinuation of free ESXi does not really affect my daily job or my home lab. In my opinion, free ESXi had gone a long way towards VMware's success, especially in the olden times. If VMware's current caretakers think they need to forget the past to move forward (get paid more), I am sure they have more intelligent people than me working on that. The good news is that I was recently turned on to Proxmox, and I totally dig it. It's way more capable out of the starting gate, and my new lab is pretty much completely Proxmox; even this website is hosted on nested Proxmox. The fact that under the hood it's pretty much Debian is like a gift from the tech gods. I don't know the market saturation of companies using Proxmox in production environments, but from some searching I have found quite a few examples of fairly large production workloads running on decent-sized HA clusters. I would imagine that the only place Proxmox could possibly fall flat is in third-party integrations or consideration by third-party vendors. These things may or may not be important to an Enterprise or CSP. With many smaller enterprise companies adopting public cloud these days and ditching the DC, I wonder if a product like Proxmox can really find its legs and make a dent. I don't have enough experience with it at scale to see the possible limitations expose themselves. I have never had the "all eggs in one basket" mentality, and I don't buy into ecosystems. I feel like that is what's happening to many with public cloud. There are many cool things about AWS/Azure, but the downsides are always there. I also plan on installing XCP-ng at some point to check out what's happening over there, when I do, I will do the blog thing.
