Since Broadcom’s $61 billion acquisition of VMware closed in November 2023, Broadcom has been charging ahead with major changes to the company’s personnel and products. In December, Broadcom began laying off thousands of employees and stopped selling perpetually licensed versions of VMware products, pushing its customers toward more stable and lucrative software subscriptions instead. In January, it ended its partner programs, potentially disrupting sales and service for many users of its products.
This week, Broadcom is making a change that is smaller in scale but possibly more relevant for home users of its products: The free version of VMware’s vSphere Hypervisor, also known as ESXi, is being discontinued.
Lotta people here working in legacy not realizing you can run bare metal k8s with containers and never touch a proper vm again. That said, if you are in the cloud basically everything is a vm even when you are using k8s. Two of the big three cloud providers run on top of Xen and one uses hyper-v for all of their machine types