Comment on Broadcom-owned VMware kills the free version of ESXi virtualization software
BigDanishGuy@sh.itjust.works 4 months ago
LOL was about to implement esxi, on a rather beefy surplus server, to run all my students’ PCs on since win 11 won’t boot on their hardware from 24h2… Guess my students won’t get to use VMware and the purchase approval I just got for a few workstation pro licenses wasn’t needed.
Proxmox for baremetal hypervisor, or? I’ve got a bunch of windows server licenses as well, I think some for hyper-v server as well. What would you implement?
Proxmox is really good, same with XCP-ng. You could also run something like Debian server and roll your own KVM based platform if you have the chops.
Overall, lots of solid choices in the Open Source realm. I would avoid proprietary solutions, since that’s largely the reason the whole VMWare situation happened in the first place.
Check xcp-ng with xen-orchestra.
Here’s a really nice guide to XCP-NG vs Proxmox
Personally, I just run straight KVM on Debian or Ubuntu servers, but that’s not for everyone. Web based management for KVM is still kind of rough. Cockpit is getting there, but it’s missing key features, and the web based graphical console absolutely sucks.
Hyper-V or nutanix community. those will be the dominant hypervisors in the near future. I can see nutanix really taking off soon if they cant reach some of the features that VMware had. Hyper-v is sort of stuck since their host OS layer sucks, but it’s also pretty cheap.
They’ve “redone” hyper-v a bit with the Azure HCI stack, but yeah, the OS layer sucks. Even more so than normal windows server.
I really like XCP-ng. Imo the interface is more understandable and polished than Proxmox. Similar to vSphere + vCenter, but more advanced options as well.
habitualTartare@lemmy.world 4 months ago
I’m happy with proxmox in a non-production environment/homeLab. Stable and straightforward.
Just found out from your comment that windows is shutting the door completely on CPUs that don’t support POPCNT. There’s config settings to install Windows 11 on legacy hardware (old CPU, tpm chips, etc) but who knows when they’ll pull the plug on that.
Tja@programming.dev 4 months ago
Weird as it is, it’s not as radical as I thought:
Of course they probably could have avoided it, but a 15 year old PC is as close to ewaste as it gets. Even if you could run Linux on it, a modern smartwatch probably has more computing power, let alone a smartphone or raspberry pi. The main use could be as a space heater.
cm0002@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Yea there’s plenty of reasons to shit on MS, but dropping support for a 15+ years old CPUs isn’t one of them lol
If someone is being affected by this, then maybe it’s time for them to upgrade their shit lmao