You can tell that that page was written by a "real" VMware employee, with the thinly-veiled "it's Broadcom's fault"!

Indeed, now we need the likes of Veeam etc to start building support for other hypervisors so we can start the homelab away

The pay with support is not much better - they want a minimum of 3500 cores at US$350 per core - The site says per month, but it might be per year and it is a "miss print" but sites still says per month, with a 3-year minimum commitment. you can get a discount if you pay upfront, but still over a mill, and you have till April to sort out something else.

Calculator to help with sizing for the new stack
https://williamlam.com/2024/02/updated-inventory-calculator-scripts-for-counting-cores-tibs-for-vmware-cloud-foundation-vcf-and-vmware-vsphere-foundation-vvf.html 

mentalinc:

 

Indeed, now we need the likes of Veeam etc to start building support for other hypervisors so we can start the homelab away

 

I moved to KVM a couple of years ago. I figured the direct integration into the Linux kernel and open source made KVM's eventual supremicy inevatable. Proxmox wraps around it but I figured I'd just teach myself the raw KVM CLI and it has worked out very nicely. I run Ubuntu LTS KVM hosts on ultro low power fanless "NUC's" from Ali for my home lab. Everything works under it including various Linux, Windows and network device guests. 

noroad:

 

I figured the direct integration into the Linux kernel and open source made KVM's eventual supremicy inevatable.

 

The bhyve hypervisor is also a contender here. It was developed on FreeBSD, but it's quite portable. It has been ported to SmartOS (based on Illumos, a fork of Open Solaris), where according to the Wikipedia page for the OS, it is the preferred hypervisor for Windows and Linux guests. The OS supports both bhyve and KVM.

I finally moved away from my ancient ESXi install a few months ago to a FreeBSD install running bhyve with the bvcp front-end, but my needs are minimal.

 

 

The bhyve hypervisor is also a contender here. It was developed on FreeBSD

 

Freebsd, good on you, someone has to swim upstream eh :-)

Been looking at XCP-ng and have a host running nested currently on ESXI

Free community version of Orchestra (Vsphere alternative) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B6qX_nvd8Ac - All the commands to run are in the description.

Alternative guide (I followed the one above): https://community.spiceworks.com/t/how-to-setup-xen-orchestra-community-edition-free/1012241 

XCP-NG Center - https://github.com/xcp-ng/xenadmin/releases Kinda an alternative to RVTools

There also appears to be a built in process to migrate off VMware - https://xcp-ng.org/blog/2022/10/19/migrate-from-vmware-to-xcp-ng/ But I've not tried it yet.

Main concern is how to replace VSAN!

Keen to hear what others are looking into

I was running a machine bootable into ESXi as my homelab, but maybe that can stay on ESXi 6.5 and never get updated. I should spend more time learning KVM, although I did run some test VMs on KVM a while back. Unlike ESXi I'm not going to need a new nic card to get KVM running again.

Sometimes it seems like Broadcom have a chip in almost every enterprise server. Most likely if you abandon vSphere and run everything on Bare Metal, they come out winning either way.