VMware revives its free ESXi hypervisor in an utterly obscure way

Home labs and bare bones test rigs matter so Broadcom's back in the game

VMware has resumed offering a free hypervisor.

News of the offering emerged in a throwaway line in the Release Notes for version 8.0 Update 3e of the Broadcom business unit's ESXi hypervisor.

Just below the "What's New" section of that document is the statement: "Broadcom makes available the VMware vSphere Hypervisor version 8, an entry-level hypervisor. You can download it free of charge from the Broadcom Support portal."

We've asked VMware for details about the new release and its capabilities, but no further information was available at the time of writing.

VMware offered a free version of ESXi for years, and it was beloved by home lab operators and vAdmins who needed something to tinker with. But in February 2024, VMware discontinued it on grounds that it was dropping perpetual licenses and moving to subscriptions.

If you want to try the hypervisor, you'll need to be registered with Broadcom's customer support portal to download it. Sadly, our virtualization desk's home lab is not currently operational, so while we've downloaded the ISO file, we haven't been able to get it running. Suffice it to say, it doesn't want to run nested inside a desktop hypervisor.

Broadcom hasn't explained why it has reversed its decision, but it's not hard to guess.

VMware shops and partners of all sizes might need test or training environments, but as Broadcom only sells subscriptions (and greatly favors three-year terms) there's no cheap way to access Virtzilla's code. A modest freebie makes it more likely the vCurious will do some tinkering that turns into a sale. Free editions are also a way of building a talent pool.

VMware's rivals know this. Nutanix has had a free Community Edition for years and Platform9 announced a free edition of its own a couple of weeks back. Other VMware competitors are open source, so their code is always free.

While VMware has made its Workstation desktop hypervisor free, it lacked a no-cost server virtualization option. Now it's back in the game.

The Register has also seen reports that Broadcom may have reversed the policy that saw one VMware distributor announce minimum license purchases rising from 16 to 72 cores. The reports say the core floor is back at 16, perhaps to quell customer ire.

SmartNIC/DPU update

In VMware-adjacent news, readers may remember the vSphere Distributed Services Engine that offloads workloads like firewalls from the CPU to a data processing unit (DPU aka SmartNIC).

Hyperscalers have used DPUs for years to run network and security services. VMware hoped the Distributed Services Engine would see DPUs become common in its customers' more modest datacenters.

Analyst firm Crehan Research last week teased a report suggesting mainstream adoption of DPUs is not happening and that AWS and Azure together account for around two-thirds of purchases, with Alibaba, CoreWeave, Google, IBM, Oracle, and xAI the other big buyers.

"DPU/SmartNIC adoption has, so far, been mostly within companies that rent server capabilities to customers, and has not yet seen broad penetration into markets beyond this," said Seamus Crehan, president of Crehan Research. "However, we are seeing new innovations, use cases, and deployment models such as DPU-enabled Ethernet switches and CPU replacement, which should expand the customer base."

Nvidia is also keen on DPUs and suggests them as a fine tool to speed performance of AI workloads. Maybe DPUs will catch that wave, too. ®