Broadcom’s buyout of VMware resulted the end of free version of ESXi.
With it, I have to start moving out my VMs from ESXi to something else. There are a few, and for me
– proxmox
– xcp-ng / xen
– bhyve
Majority seem to like proxmox, and I think I understand why. Pretty nice UI and for small user like me, it should work pretty well, especially Linux only users.
To me, proxmox is “too busy”. I want something simple. ESXi (vSphere?) free was comprehesive and did what I want it to do.
As a FreeBSD usre, bhyve is a possibility. The downside is, there is no good web UI at the moment, so everything needs to be done from command line.
Xen, especially using FreeBSD as dom0 is an interesting option but it would add extra layer of learning.
xcp-ng is a ESXi wanna be but the lingos and UI is lacking. I spent a few hours going through the menus and I am somewhat lost. Feature wise, it does what I want to do.
Well, the 4th option is to go back to bare metal. It’s not like I have too many VMs. (I am running 5 VMs.) and some can be consolidated. Some VMs can be done with docker or VirtualBox as well.
This is truely a PITA situation to undo the VMs. It is likely I have to write down a few posts for the transition.
TBH, at the moment, the front runner is xcp-ng. If I can run XOA in a docker, it would solve the most everything I want to do.