So for all the home lab enthusiasts who face vSphere @work and want to toy with it @home - go for it. But don’t trust them to keep it free 
Registration at the Broadcom support portal mandatory, but apart from that really free this time. Perpetual license builtin. No obtaining and managing keys, anymore.
Take care,
Patrick
Time to grab a new licence incase they invalidate my old one, which is still working.
Thanks for that very good information.
Thanks, Patrick.
Better off rolling Proxmox or xcp-ng than going through that. I left the VMware gravy train a long time ago.
Yup, I moved to xcp-ng with xoa compiled from sources and it is working great.
Does anyone know if this will overwrite my licensed version? I have a VMUG Advantage licensed version, but of course Broadcom cut off the updates to lowly scum like me, and I know there was a fairly nasty exploit a few weeks ago. Mine are currently stuck back in December 2024 with 8.0u3c.
Trying to get my VMUG and Broadcom accounts linked has been “problematic” and I’m growing “unhappy”. Next on the list is Nutanix and I may nuke my lab and get going on it soon. At least they make it plain what they want up front (no free email addresses), then you can get the community version and free training without jumping through additional hoops. Not sure if my little lab has enough CPU for Nutanix, but going to find out.
XCP-ng/XO works great for 95% of what people need (personal or enterprise). Just wish it had hyperconverged storage available for free, would be neat to play with it. Rumor is that you can manually install all the bits to make XOstor work since it is based on all open sourced projects, but I have not found a guide yet.
If you want to be a rebel, run the Xen Project.
The main reason I stopped using VMware at home and switched to TrueNAS for VMs (first core, now scale) was because I got hyperconverged storage, for a single node at least. Are you running more than 1 VM server?
Also, I’m not taking the bait from Broadcom. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.
I’m emulating what I would do in a small enterprise situation, always 3 hosts so I can do things like rolling pool updates/reboots, etc.
My interest in VMware is simply to open doors that are otherwise shut. People sneer when I mention XCP, those people are tied to VMware and can’t open their minds to anything else, no matter how much the price went up.
I use VMware professionally and was of this opinion until the price hikes. Now I’m trying to get us off this overpriced nonsense before my boss turns on too many of the expensive features we were forced to buy (like the Aria Suite and NSX). If you want to be a VMware person (a fair career choice, no judgement 
), I’d be working on my NSX skills more than anything else. That seems to be a key differentiator from the cheaper VM offerings. Not that you need career advice from me, but I had an opinion I thought might be of value to you. Good luck sorting out your licensing issues, you might want to engage VMware/Broadcom support on it.
Well Broadcom will not let me download ESXi, it keep saying that my account verification is pending. Pending what exactly for free software? Eh, I have ESXi 7 and 8 in operation already and two licenses,l one for each.
I think a lot of the closed mindedness is that people don’t want to learn new things. They seem to want to stay in their lane and never look around to see if there might be something that is cheaper or works better. Windows 11 is causing a huge stir where I work, all doom and gloom and maybe buying a bunch of extended contracts. I swapped my little system over last summer, it was a non-event, even the 24h2 update was a non-event.
As far as downloading the free version, I think there is an email with a link you need to click to confirm your account, trying to remember because I did this like the first day it was announced to see if my latest Broadcom account really worked.
There is a VMUG townhall tomorrow, May 1, going to push them on what is really available for my $200, and if the lack of updates might be a breach of contract! I’m getting salty over this.
I just found that the current “new” free version does not include the virtual TPM. So no Windows 11 … seriously? My registered “free license” before the takeover definitely did. 
Server 2025 might be an issue too, I haven’t tried it yet without vtpm and secureboot.
The thing is, my account was established a long time ago, it’s been there jsut after Broadcom took over. Eh, not a big deal.
And when Windoze no longer looks appealing to me, I will make the switch. But in the corporate world, Windoze is still a very common user platform.
I think Fedora might be coming for that corporate marketshare, Mac certainly is. I’m currently kicking the tires on Fedora 42 on my home desktop and laptop, and I haven’t had to drop into a CLI once to do…anything really. Apart from SSH, I don’t think I’ve used the terminal to accomplish anything.
Yup. I mentioned this to the head of VMUG in an email today, it’s a bad look and all they had to do was block it, which they did with the token garbage that locked my licensed system out (VMUG Advantage 1 year license).
Rug pull after rug pull, Broadcom is taking heat from all sides… And they still do not care! They also claim that they have a big problem because of the lack of people certified in VCF. Maybe don’t be Richard Craniums and help us to help you! (salty!)
