With no notice or fanfare, VMware is once again offering a free version of its ESXi hypervisor for download. The new free version of VMware vSphere Hypervisor version 8 can be downloaded from Broadcom’s support portal, but registration is required.
For years, ESXi was free to use and popular with home users and IT enthusiasts alike, because it gave IT professionals a chance to try VMware before they bought it. That changed in February 2024 after VMware was acquired by Broadcom and it proceeded to transition and perpetual licensing and migrate to a subscription model, a decision that went over very poorly.
Broadcom didn’t exactly promote the news of the return, either. It was simply a line in the release notes for version 8.0 Update 3e of ESXi. Broadcom wrote in the “What’s New” section of the note:
“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. No Broadcom support is available for this offering and it is for non-production use. vSphere Hypervisor cannot connect to vCenter and therefore cannot be centrally managed.”
Reached for comment, Broadcom stated it did not have anything to say beyond the above statement.
The initial reason for free ESXi was those competitors such as Microsoft, Nutanix, and open-source vendors offered free or low-cost virtualization and VMware its own response to the free alternatives. It may have limitations compared to paid editions, but it wasn’t meant to be deployable solution, it served as an effective on-ramp, experts said.
By many accounts, Broadcom’s handling of the VMware acquisition was clumsy and caused many enterprises to reevaluate their relationship with the vendor The move to subscription models was tilted in favor of larger customers and longer, three-year licenses. Because the string of bad publicity and VMware’s competitors pounced, offering migration deals and packages.
However, replacing a virtualization environment is neither trivial nor easy. That said, Broadcom must have been feeling some heat to bring back the free hypervisor. But it’s more than just Broadcom’s approach that is a threat to VMware’s dominance. It is the shifting sands of computing in the AI era.
“VMware is still highly relevant for managing the overall IT infrastructure that supports AI initiatives,” said Rob Enderle, president of the Enderle Group. “However, for the core task of large-scale AI model training and inference, the gravity has shifted significantly towards bare-metal clusters, container orchestration (Kubernetes), and specialized public cloud services, making VMware’s traditional hypervisor-centric approach less central than it is for general enterprise workloads.”
Broadcom is adapting to this brave new world, but the ecosystem’s center for massive AI lies increasingly outside the traditional VM management sphere. “And right now much of the focus is on this AI training making VMware less relevant,” he said, adding that the Broadcom acquisition has had customers fleeing the platform because a lot of customers don’t like Broadcom’s licensing models.
Source:: Network World