So, a while back VMWare was purchased by Broadcom.
If you work in IT you already know where this is going. If you don't there are a couple of things that you should know.
VMWare makes a number of products, one that I have worked with quite a bit is called ESXi, it's effectively a platform that lets you run virtual machines so that you can run multiple things of of a single piece of hardware. It's a huge thing if you work in IT or like to pretend that you do. One of the big reasons that it was popular was because VMWare basically let you use ESXi for free and you would have to pay for some of the more advanced features.
While those advanced features were freaking cool you could still get a lot done with the free version of the platform, with a little more running around and manually poking at things.
When Broadcom bought VMWare a lot of people started to worry about what Broadcom was planning since they have a bit of a reputation as to how they handle companies they purchase. Sure enough earlier this year they killed off the free version of ESXi and then started putting the screws to people who are using their software with price increases.
Strangely enough they have released VMWare Workstation and VMWare Fusion, the desktop versions of their hypervisor, as free for personal use.
Regardless seeing the writing on the wall I was already looking into other options for running virtual machines and in the end Proxmox became the platform that I decided to put into production in places where I needed something. And when the time came to put other projects underway VMWare was basically ignored as a potential platform just because of the pricing and uncertainty regarding what was going to happen.
I'm very glad that the FOSS options managed to get caught up to VMWare - at least as far as I needed it to get for my workloads.
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