Following mega acquisition of VMware, Broadcom removes popular free hypervisor

Broadcom is continuing to revamp VMware products, in the wake of the giant takeover deal valued at over NZ$100 billion closing in November last year despite resistance from competition watchdogs worldwide.

This time, VMware has done away with the free vSphere ESXi hypervisor that anyone could download and use.

"Along with the termination of perpetual licensing, Broadcom has also decided to discontinue the Free ESXi Hypervisor, marking it as EOGA (End of General Availability)," the company said.

VMware ESXi is an operating system that runs directly on servers. It is a bare-metal hypervisor that is used to run virtual machines (VMs) which are essentially software computers. This is called virtualisation, and allows systems administrators to make good use of today's powerful computer hardware.

Hypervisors aren't used to run apps, which instead go into VMs; a beefy server with a hypervisor can run several configurable VMs independently and separately of each other. The technology forms the basis of cloud computing.

For many users, the free version of ESXi was an important tool to learn virtualisation and systems administration, and testing. It was also popular with hobbyists that didn't need, or could work around some missing features found in the paid for version of the hypervisor.

The reason VMware grew into a virtualisation market leader was that its hypervisor offering is fully-featured, very stable and reliable, which enterprises around the world required.

As mentioned above, Broadcom announced that it would no longer licence VMware products on a perpetual basis, allowing customers to pay just once. That announcement, made in December last year shortly after the Broadcom takeover had concluded, was unpopular with customers reluctant to shift to a subscription model with regular charges for VMware software.

This is not the first time VMware has raised customers' ire with licensing changes designed to increase revenue.

In 2020, the company moved from per-processor licensing to a per-core model. Modern servers use processors with multiple cores, and the change raised costs for customers.

Free and open source alternatives to ESXi that run directly on hardware include the Xen Hypervisor, which is used by cloud giants Amazon Web Services and IBM Softlayer, Proxmox, and the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) for Linux distributions.