Goodbye, VMware

I've used VMware, both professionally and personally, for almost 20 years. I started with VMware GSX server and ESX 3.5 in my Homelab and set up my first cluster of my career with ESX 4.1 circa 2008 or 2009. VMware ESXi has been the workhorse of my homelab for years and my hypervisor of choice. It has run all of my workloads for quite some time. Originally, I used the standalone ESXi Free version. I then purchased and maintained a VMware Essentials license for years. Once VMUG came along, I joined and enjoyed the VMUG Advantage licenses to play around with the VMware technologies. On the flip side, I've been a major part of the design, architecture, and operation several VMware clusters and larger VMware-based infrastructures throughout my career. I finally had the time to achieve my VCP-DCV7 certification in the fall of 2022.

As we all know, Broadcom purchased VMware in late 2023 and have made sweeping changes to how VMware functions in both cost and product offering. Prior to the purchase date, many folks predicted that Broadcom would increase prices and cut people and products including VMUG, however, Broadcom insisted that they would not be doing this. As a surprise to no one, they did this. At work, our licensing increased 600 to 900% for the same request. At home, VMware strung me along for 3 months while I tried to renew my Essentials license (I started before the Broadcom purchase date) before telling me the product was no longer offered. I will not beat this dead horse.

Thats fine, I thought, I'll have VMUG and they said they wouldn't be cutting VMUG. Wrong again. In November of 2024, Broadcom announced large changes to VMUG and VMUG Advantage. See link to the announcement. What this meant:

1. VMUG Advantage users had 30 days (Until November 30, 2024) to download product licenses from the VMUG Advantage portal before all products would cease to be offered.
2. The VMUG Advantage portal would be offline until sometime in 2025 when Broadcom would establish a new portal.
3. The VMUG Advantage subscription would still be $250 per year, however, the subscriber would be required to pay for and pass a VCF or VVF subscription in order to obtain VCF or VVF licenses.

I am not interested in being required to take, pay for, and pass a certification in order for me to play around with VMwares offerings if I already pay for the VMUG Advantage subscription. I considered may path forward. During this time, I also changed jobs which took me away from a VMware-centric environment and introduced me to a primarily Azure cloud environment. Additionally, I was exposed to and required to write Terraform code for all infrastructure configuration. So farewell VMWare and Broadcom. I will miss you VMware. Not you Broadcom. It's been a fun ride. I have started the process of replatforming all of my workloads using infrastructure-as-code to Proxmox. I had been torn between Proxmox and XCP-NG. I had used XCP-NG in the past and while it worked well, I wasn't super comfortable with it. I tried Proxmox and I seemed to like it a bit better.

In future posts, I will describe my replatforming journey as well as my personal journey of mapping VMware terms to Proxmox terms.