As luck would have it, Broadcom ended up reinstating the free version of ESXi a month ago. With my home lab in a better state ...

Broadcom has made sweeping changes to VMware's business since acquiring ... One alternative to ESXi for home users and small organizations is Proxmox Virtual Environment, a Debian-based Linux ...

The tool also allows VMs from other virtualization platforms – including VMware's vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V, Nutanix AHV, or even the Azure and AWS clouds – to be restored into Proxmox.

Broadcom has been sending cease-and-desist letters to owners of VMware perpetual licenses with expired support contracts, Ars Technica has confirmed.

Proxmox is free, or comes with inexpensive support, and is suited to SMEs. As a virtualisation platform, it can displace VMware. We also see a smaller percentage migrate to Nutanix and Hyper-V.” ...

Proxmox Virtual Environment (VE) 8.4 brings many small improvements to details as well as three interesting new functions for administrators: direct access from VMs to the host file system without ...