Working in software I frequently find myself having to test things with my companies products and other products that our stuff is interacting with or potentially competing with. A huge tool for this has been the ability to run virtual machines on both my desktop, laptop, and dedicated “servers” that I keep around. For the longest time VMWare was the gold standard for this workflow and I was a huge proponent of their products.
As much as I do like free software and will use it whenever I can for a very long time VMWare Workstation and ESXi Server where the gold standard and I ran both solutions at home and at work to simulate large pools of machines and to test out things that needed to be looked into.
However, in 2022 an announcement was made by Broadcom that they were going to aquire VMWare.
Anybody who’s been in enterprise software for a while kind of had a bad feeling at that point. Broadcom has a bit of a reputation of acquiring companies and maximizing shareholder value at the expense of end users.
Now roll the clock forward two years and the free version of ESXi that a lot of people cut their teeth on is gone without anything to replace it from Broadcom. And sure, they have made the desktop product(s), VMWare Workstation and Fusion, free for pretty much anybody who wanted to use them there’s also no support for those products any more from the folks at Broadcom so if you have any issues you better pray that someone on the forums has an answer and that they will continue to see value in updating the product so that it keeps working properly.
Personally once I heard about the purchase I started looking into some other options. After playing with XCP-ng, Proxmox, and a few other options I eventually landed on Proxmox as a replacement on my server side of things. Turns out that it worked well enough that it replaced the OS on not only my own servers but on all the devices that I had sitting at work that were running VMWare products on them. We still have the desktop product sitting around as it’s still a better user experience than VirtualBox, but as we start refreshing hardware I’m starting to force my staff to deal with VirtualBox just to see if we can’t make that work in preperation for Broadcom doing something to finish off killing VMWare Workstation.
Given that it’s alaways a good idea to have a backup plan I’m probably going to toss XCP-ng on another box at home and start playing with that more just in case Proxmox decides to do someting that I can’t stomach in the future, hopefully that’s something that’s a good long way off though.