VMware (quietly) brings back its free ESXi hypervisor

By many accounts, Broadcom’s handling of the VMware acquisition was clumsy and caused many enterprises to reevaluate their relationship with the vendor The move to subscription models was tilted in favor of larger customers and longer, three-year licenses. Because the string of bad publicity and VMware’s competitors pounced, offering migration deals and packages.

However, replacing a virtualization environment is neither trivial nor easy. That said, Broadcom must have been feeling some heat to bring back the free hypervisor. But it’s more than just Broadcom’s approach that is a threat to VMware’s dominance. It is the shifting sands of computing in the AI era.

“VMware is still highly relevant for managing the overall IT infrastructure that supports AI initiatives,” said Rob Enderle, president of the Enderle Group. “However, for the core task of large-scale AI model training and inference, the gravity has shifted significantly towards bare-metal clusters, container orchestration (Kubernetes), and specialized public cloud services, making VMware’s traditional hypervisor-centric approach less central than it is for general enterprise workloads.”

Broadcom is adapting to this brave new world, but the ecosystem’s center for massive AI lies increasingly outside the traditional VM management sphere. “And right now much of the focus is on this AI training making VMware less relevant,” he said, adding that the Broadcom acquisition has had customers fleeing the platform because a lot of customers don’t like Broadcom’s licensing models.