The free edition of VMware’s ESXi hypervisor (ESXi 7.x and 8.x) has been discontinued by Broadcom. In addition to terminating the perpetual license, Broadcom has chosen to stop offering the Free ESXi Hypervisor and has marked it as EOGA (End of General Availability). Thus, the free version of VMware vSphere Hypervisor is no longer available on the VMware website.
A little amount of RAM was handled by the free version of ESXi, and it lacked numerous management features. Next to that, it could only operate on a restricted number of cores. Therefore, even though in theory it might be used in production, it was better suited for testing and hobby use.
VMware does not presently provide a replacement product. The hypervisor may still be used without paying full price even after the free version is discontinued since trialware and the VMWare User Group Advantage license are still in effect.
VMware advises customers to read this blog post here, for more information about the impacted products and this change.
About VMware vSphere
Last summer, VMware became a part of Broadcom, a major player in the worldwide semiconductor and infrastructure software markets, for an estimated $61 billion in acquisition costs.
With its headquarters in San Jose, California, and a NASDAQ listing (AVGO), Broadcom is a company that designs, develops, and sells a broad range of infrastructure software and semiconductor products. Serving sectors such as data centers, networking, corporate software, Internet, wireless, storage, and industrial, Broadcom has a wide range of products and solutions available.
VMware released the initial version of its industry-leading virtualization platform vSphere at April 21, 2009. Th solution is intended to manage and optimize IT infrastructure in cloud and data center settings. It gives businesses the ability to operate many virtual machines (VMs) on a single physical server by offering an extensive feature set for server virtualization.
Via its vCenter Server component, vSphere provides capabilities including fault tolerance, centralized management, dynamic resource allocation, and high availability. vSphere would help improve operational efficiency, scalability, and flexibility in deploying and managing virtualized workloads across different settings, from on-premises to colocation data centers to hybrid and multi-cloud configurations, thanks to its “strong security features and seamless interface” with other VMware products.
