On 10/13/2017 12:33 PM, Giles Orr via talk wrote:

I'm having some trouble figuring out the licensing on VMware's ESXi.  It's proprietary - I've got that and I don't love it.  But Packt's "DevOps Automation Cookbook" (2015) is essentially saying it's free to use, and implying - I don't think they ever stated it outright - that it's permanently free.  But on VMware's site ( https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-vSphere/6.0/com.vmware.vsphere.vcenterhost.doc/GUID-7AFCC64B-7D94-48A0-86CF-8E7EF55DF68F.html ) it reads as if it's a 60 day evaluation, period.

Which brings up a few questions:
- is ESXi technically good enough that I should be pursuing this at all?  (I'm currently using Proxmox.  It works, I'm not entirely happy with it, but I'll probably stick with it because of the licensing which is more open source friendly)
- is ESXi permanently free? and can you get security updates if you're on the free licensing?
- is there anything appalling in their license? eg. Facebook's recent license clauses "using our products means you can't ever sue us for anything" (point applies even though they fixed it)

I have clients using VMware and Proxmox and VirtualBox and I use virt-manager and OpenStack for my own use.

VMware and VirtualBox tend to do better on windows systems and stuff like USB devices and both are really easy to use to put up one of virtual machines.
Both also have CLI interfaces that can be used if your desperate.
There are some add on packages for VirtualBox to give it a GUI

Proxmox is more or less the moral equivalent of virt-manager that can only manage continers and KVM along with some hooks for HA.
Proxmox has the upside of a web interface where virt-manager is an X based application.
Virt-manger has the upside of letting you manage a variety of virtualization engines beyond KVM.

For small sized personal/experimental use all are acceptable.
Proxmox has the upside that you can use it like an appliance and just install it fairly trivially.
Virt-manager works nicely if you like managing the OS that your virtualiztion sits on top of.

If you have complex networking or storage requirements then something like OpenStack or the other cloud managers start to make sense but the minimum size there is 3-5 machines before it begins to make sense.

I would say stick with Proxmox.

What is your Proxmox problem?