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  • ESXi

    From Accession@21:1/200 to All on Tuesday, November 04, 2025 17:05:12
    Hey All!

    I'm sure I read it somewhere before that they made ESXi free again, but probably didn't really let it soak in or believe it.

    Anyhow, yesterday I went to the Broadcom site, and sure shit, as of 8.0 Update 3s or something, it is free again to download after you setup an account on the site. I got excited.

    I downloaded it, burned it to a USB stick with Rufus, shut down all my VMs and rebooted into the installer. Once I got to the point where I pick the drive to install the new medium on (it is supposed to look for an already installed ESXi), it saw my drives, but didn't show ESXi installed on any of them.

    Much further digging, and the latest versions of ESXi don't support my old ass hardware any more (Proliant ML310e Gen8). I think the latest I could go is either 6.7 or 7.0 Update 3 with some kind of a customized build for pre-Gen9 HPE hardware. I'm currently at 6.5, so don't really care to bother with it any more. I was more excited to try out the new and shiny, but that didn't work out too well for me. ;)

    Eh well, that was a waste of a few hours. lol

    Regards,
    Nick

    ... Sarcasm: because beating people up is illegal.
    --- GoldED+/LNX 1.1.5-b20250409
    * Origin: _thePharcyde telnet://bbs.pharcyde.org (Wisconsin) (21:1/200)
  • From niter3@21:1/199 to Accession on Tuesday, November 04, 2025 20:56:00
    Hey All!

    I'm sure I read it somewhere before that they made ESXi free again, but probably didn't really let it soak in or believe it.

    Really, all the same free features as before?

    I moved to proxmox a while back, been running fine since. Seems like more effort then anything to go back?

    --- Mystic BBS v1.12 A49 2023/04/30 (Linux/64)
    * Origin: Clutch BBS * telnet://clutchbbs.com (21:1/199)
  • From Accession@21:1/200 to niter3 on Tuesday, November 04, 2025 22:20:38
    Hey niter3!

    On Tue, 04 Nov 2025 20:56:00 -0500, you wrote:

    Really, all the same free features as before?

    As far as I can tell, yes.. I think the announcement was something in the lines of "as of ESXi 8.0 update 3s" or something, and they're now on "update 3w").

    I moved to proxmox a while back, been running fine since. Seems like
    more effort then anything to go back?

    I would agree with you there. If I were ever to snag up some new hardware, I'd most likely switch also. But the fact that I'm already running ESXi 6.5 update 1, I figured I'd try an easy upgrade to the shiny new stuff without having to migrate my VMs or anything. I was severely disappointed, though.

    I have no issues with ESXi 6.5 except some quirky shit I can get around (as easy as refreshing the page) in the web GUI, so I'll stick with it for the remainder of this server's lifespan, which could be awhile yet unless I come across something for the right price. ;)

    Regards,
    Nick

    ... Sarcasm: because beating people up is illegal.
    --- GoldED+/LNX 1.1.5-b20250409
    * Origin: _thePharcyde telnet://bbs.pharcyde.org (Wisconsin) (21:1/200)
  • From poindexter FORTRAN@21:4/122 to Accession on Tuesday, November 04, 2025 20:58:51
    Re: ESXi
    By: Accession to All on Tue Nov 04 2025 05:05 pm

    Much further digging, and the latest versions of ESXi don't support my old ass hardware any more (Proliant ML310e Gen8). I think the latest I could go is either 6.7 or 7.0 Update 3 with some kind of a customized build for pre-Gen9 HPE hardware. I'm currently at 6.5, so don't really care to bother with it any more. I was more excited to try out the new and shiny, but that didn't work out too well for me. ;)

    VMWare dropped support for my 4-year old Dells, and VMWare Workstation for Linux only worked with certain kernels. Update your kernel and VMWare would break until you updated it - if they had an update for a version other than the latest and greatest.

    That's what attracted me to Proxmox - I've run it on the cheapest, EOL crap and it just runs. I'm seriously tempted to move my production servers at work to it; I'm mostly running utility and dev workloads on them now.
    --- SBBSecho 3.30-Win32
    * Origin: realitycheckBBS.org -- information is power. (21:4/122)
  • From paulie420@21:2/150 to Accession on Tuesday, November 04, 2025 20:56:15
    Much further digging, and the latest versions of ESXi don't support my
    old ass hardware any more (Proliant ML310e Gen8). I think the latest I could go is either 6.7 or 7.0 Update 3 with some kind of a customized build for pre-Gen9 HPE hardware. I'm currently at 6.5, so don't really care to bother with it any more. I was more excited to try out the new
    and shiny, but that didn't work out too well for me. ;)

    OMG. So they made it free again, but made it so you had to be on CORPORATE prod hardware??? Great... at this point, just install PVE and PBS and move on - Proxmox is the shyyyyttttt!



    |07p|15AULIE|1142|07o
    |08.........

    --- Mystic BBS v1.12 A49 2024/05/29 (Linux/64)
    * Origin: 2o fOr beeRS bbs>>>20ForBeers.com:1337 (21:2/150)