this post was submitted on 13 Feb 2024
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The reality is that nobody's learning much useful from Free ESXi, as you need vCenter for any of the good stuff. They want you using the eval license for that, which gives you the full experience but only for 60 days.
Still, there's a lot of folks running free ESXi in labs (home and otherwise) and other small environments that may need to expand at some point. They're killing a lot of good will and entry-level market saturation for what appears (to me at least) literally zero benefit. The paid software is the same, so they're not developing any less. And they weren't offering support with the free license anyway, so they're not saving anything there.
That's a great point. But vsphere not being available in the free tier kind of proves my point. Why hamstring your free tier by eliminating the more useful features? I understand not giving away your product for free but there was a way to do it where you turn it into a marketing tool.
You drive people away and then you end up in a situation where "esxi free tier is pointless" and then you kill that and all your goodwill completely. I guess we'll see how it plays out.
Broadcom isn't know for being great with acquisitions. It's probably going to strip it for parts and sell it off.
vSphere was never available in the free tier.