Like many IT professionals, my first experience with Virtualization was thanks to the desktop hypervisor VMware Workstation. The ability to test different operating systems on my desktop opened a new world of appliances, linux distros, and emulated environments. I outgrew what my PC was capable of in just a matter of months. In researching what to do, I came across the dedicated Hypervisor – vSphere ESXi. Even with the limitations of the early free versions (memory restrictions, vCenter) – it changed my view of how I would build infrastructure both for personal use and in my professional career.

For the last 15 years, vSphere has had a welcome place in my ever-evolving home lab. Today marks the last day of ESXi’s general availability and the last day of it running “production” in my home lab. Replaced with Nutanix’s AHV Community Edition, I won’t lie – it will be missed. As they say, off to better things and in this case, new challenges. I look forward to what Nutanix can offer and seeing what else is out there.

Read the official announcement here: End Of General Availability of the free vSphere Hypervisor (ESXi 7.x and 8.x) (broadcom.com)

For those still looking to run native vSphere disk images – you’re in luck. VMware Workstation is still available free for Personal Use. With desktops and workstations quickly surpassing 12 Cores/64GB ram/NVME – it’s still a viable option for testing. Although I prefer OVA at this point :).

VMware Workstation Pro: Now Available Free for Personal Use – VMware Workstation Zealot

– Marc