What is ESXi? It’s VMware’s bare-metal hypervisor: it installs straight onto a server, with no Linux or Windows underneath, and runs virtual machines on top. That part hasn’t changed. How you get it has. Since Broadcom bought VMware in November 2023, licensed ESXi is sold only inside per-core subscription bundles, and the free edition vanished and came back with tight limits.
My take for a small shop renting one to a few dozen servers: run Proxmox VE. Stay on ESXi if you already own licenses or depend on a feature only VMware has.
What ESXi is
ESXi is a type-1 hypervisor. Its own small kernel, the VMkernel, owns the CPUs, memory, disks and network cards and hands a slice to each VM. One host is managed through its web-based Host Client. Many hosts need vCenter Server.
Most of what people pay VMware for needs a paid license, and much of it needs vCenter too: vMotion to move running VMs between hosts, HA to restart them when a host dies, DRS to balance load, and the backup APIs that tools like Veeam use. That’s exactly where the free and paid editions part ways.
What Broadcom changed, with dates
- 22 November 2023. Broadcom completed its acquisition of VMware (Form 8-K).
- 11 December 2023. Perpetual licenses stopped being sold. VMware cut its lineup to two subscription-only offers, VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) and vSphere Foundation (VVF), and said many products would only come inside them (VMware blog, The Register).
- February 2024. Broadcom discontinued the free ESXi hypervisor, marking it end of general availability (The Register, 13 February 2024).
- November 2024. Broadcom’s VVF terms license it per core “with a minimum licensing requirement of 16 Cores per Processor” (program documentation). An 8-core CPU bills as 16.
- 10 April 2025. Free ESXi returned with ESXi 8.0 Update 3e, whose release notes say “You can download it free of charge from the Broadcom Support portal” (release notes).
- 17 June 2025. VCF 9.0 and vSphere Foundation 9.0 reached general availability (VMware blog).
- 2024 to 2026, hosting partners. The partner program went invitation-only on 5 February 2024 (The Register), cloud-provider transactions ended on 30 April 2024 (The Register), the provider program went invitation-only again in July 2025 (The Register), and in January 2026 Broadcom ended its Advantage program for cloud providers, leaving about 19 in the US by The Register’s count (The Register).
- August 2026. Microsoft said it will stop selling the license-included Azure VMware Solution on 31 October 2026, and customers move to their own VCF licenses by 30 August 2027 (The Register).
The free ESXi: what you get and what you don’t
Broadcom’s KB 399823 spells it out. You get up to 2 physical CPUs per host and 8 vCPUs per VM, managed through the Host Client. You don’t get vCenter, vMotion, DRS, HA or VADP-based backups, the management APIs are read-only at best, and there’s no Broadcom support.
The backup line is the one that bites. Agentless backup tools depend on VADP, so on free ESXi you’re back to an agent inside every guest.
It’s fine for a lab, a test box or one host with a few VMs you can rebuild. I wouldn’t run production on it.
The hardware catch
ESXi enforces a supported CPU list, and it gets shorter every major release. The vSphere 8.0 release notes say it “no longer supports CPUs which have been marked as End of Support or End of Life.” Broadcom doesn’t spell out that 8.0 list today; a 2022 post by VMware’s William Lam names Intel’s Sandy Bridge, Ivy Bridge and Haswell server chips. For 9.x, Broadcom’s CPU support article lists Xeon D-1500 and Xeon E5-2600 v4 as discontinued and says installs on them won’t proceed.
That matters on rented hardware, ours included. By those lists, the Xeon D-1541 and E5 v4 builds on our browse servers page should run ESXi 8 but not 9.x, and the older E3 and E5 chips (v1 to v3) probably fall off even the 8.0 list. Check Broadcom’s compatibility guide for your exact CPU before you plan around it. Proxmox VE asks for a 64-bit CPU with Intel VT or AMD-V (requirements), which all of them have.
Free ESXi vs licensed ESXi vs Proxmox
| ESXi free (8.0 U3e) | ESXi licensed (VVF or VCF) | Proxmox VE | |
|---|---|---|---|
| License cost | $0 | Per-core subscription, 16-core minimum per CPU, quoted by Broadcom or a partner | $0; optional subscription from €120 per socket per year |
| Caps | 2 physical CPUs per host, 8 vCPUs per VM | No free-edition caps | No license caps |
| vCenter, live migration, HA | None | vCenter, vMotion, DRS, HA | Cluster GUI on every node, live migration, HA from 3 nodes |
| Backups | No VADP; agents inside guests | VADP, works with Veeam and others | Built-in backups, free Proxmox Backup Server, Veeam plug-in |
| Support | None from Broadcom | Broadcom, included | Forum is free; tickets from €370 per socket per year (3 a year) |
| Hardware | Broadcom’s 8.x CPU list; check yours | 8.x list; 9.x drops Xeon D-1500 and E5 v4 | Any 64-bit CPU with VT-x or AMD-V |
| On a GigeNET server | $0 OS option on every order form; we install it | $0 install; you buy the licenses | $0 OS option, preinstalled |
Proxmox prices are from Proxmox’s pricing page. Broadcom doesn’t publish a VMware price list, so for real numbers on a three-host cluster, see our Proxmox vs VMware cost comparison.
Who should stay on ESXi
Stay if you’ve already paid for a subscription term. Ride it out and plan the exit around the renewal date.
Stay if you depend on something Proxmox doesn’t match: NSX micro-segmentation, Fault Tolerance, stretched vSAN, Site Recovery Manager runbooks, or a software vendor that only certifies vSphere. One of those is a reason to look harder. Two, and I’d stay and negotiate.
Who should move, and how
Move if you’re a small hosting, SaaS or IT shop where the per-core bill is the whole argument. Running free ESXi in production, with no backup API and no support, is another reason. So is hardware that’s falling off ESXi’s CPU list, because that clock doesn’t stop.
The Proxmox path is mostly drivers and networking:
- Inventory every VM: vCPU, RAM, disks, each NIC’s VLAN, and BIOS or UEFI boot.
- Build the target: one host on ZFS, or three nodes running Ceph over a private network.
- Prep Windows guests for VirtIO drivers before cutover.
- Pull VMs across with the ESXi import wizard that shipped in Proxmox VE 8.2.
- Keep the ESXi copies powered off, but intact, until you trust the new side.
Our VMware to Proxmox migration guide walks through each step.
Running either one on GigeNET
ESXi is a $0 OS option on every dedicated server order form, and we install it. Any Broadcom licenses are your responsibility. We don’t sell VMware licenses and we don’t have a licensing agreement with Broadcom, so check that your license terms cover a rented server. Check Broadcom’s compatibility guide for your CPU before ordering, too; of our builds, the D-1541 and E5 v4 are the likely fits for ESXi 8.
Proxmox VE is $0 too, and it comes preinstalled on our Proxmox dedicated servers. A three-node cluster with a 10 Gbps private network ($20 a month per server) is quoted per build. We’ve run our own cloud platform on Proxmox for over 15 years.
FAQ
Yes, again. Broadcom brought back a free edition with ESXi 8.0 Update 3e in April 2025. It’s capped at 2 physical CPUs per host and 8 vCPUs per VM, can’t join vCenter, has no VADP backups and comes with no Broadcom support.
No. Broadcom shipped VCF 9.0 in June 2025 and announced VCF 9.1 in May 2026. What Broadcom discontinued in February 2024 was the free edition, and that came back fourteen months later.
Proxmox VE, for most small and mid-size shops. It’s free, runs on KVM and imports VMs straight from ESXi, with clustering, HA, Ceph and backups built in. Hyper-V makes sense for a Windows shop already paying for Windows Server Datacenter.
Yes, if two things line up. The CPU has to be on ESXi’s supported list, and your license terms have to allow it, since a rented server isn’t hardware you own. The free edition keeps the license cost at $0 but brings its caps. On ours, we install it for $0 and the licenses are yours.
Weighing the move? Send your VM count, total RAM and storage through the custom quote form and we’ll size a Proxmox host or cluster for it.
