Open source / free hypervisors for homelab?

[Haltamer]

I've got a few PCs set up to build a bit of a home lab; To do so, I'm thinking of setting up a hypervisor with clustering, for the sheer fun of it.

In the past, I've used Xenserver, but especially in the more recent versions they've become quite aggressive with the "Pay us for that bit" mentality; Has anyone tried any other hypervisors that are (Relatively) easy to configure?
I'd at least like a GUI so I'm not tossing about with the Virtualhost and not the VM's themselves all the time.

VMWare would be the obvious answer, but I don't have any licenses. That leaves bare Xen, but as above, I'd rather not spend 99% of my time twiddling with the hypervisor CLI.

Any ideas?

[m1dg3]

Proxmox is exactly what you need - it's much quicker and easier to setup than VMWare, particularly as a cluster.

[TonyRPH]

Has VMWare stopped doing the free licence for ESXi then?

I ran it for years on the free licence, even in a business environment.

You just don't get all the fancy bits like Vmotion and the CPU / CPU cores are limited (I forget to how many) but unless you're running a really heavy duty environment, the free licence is more than adequate.

I run KVM these days, but as OP requires a GUI that's not a lot of use!

ETA: fixed spelling!

Edited by TonyRPH on Friday 18th January 13:31

[Haltamer]

m1dg3 said:

Proxmox is exactly what you need - it's much quicker and easier to setup than VMWare, particularly as a cluster.

I was having a look at this last night, Think it'll probably be what I go for

[Harpoon]

ESXi is still free, just need to register for an account to download it:

https://www.vmware.com/go/get-free-esxi

Has a browser GUI now, so no need to even install the old client

[Gareth79]

I use ESXi on a G8 Microserver (using the special HP distribution) and it's nice. As mentioned above, before v6 you had to run a client or other software, but there's a built-in web server on the newer versions that works pretty well.

The limits on the free version are related to cores and memory (2 cores per VM and 32GB total I think), and for general messing around it's unlikely to be a problem.

[buggalugs]

Not sure ESXi does clustering, OpenStack / Devstack might be worth a look?

[theboss]

You need vcenter server and full vsphere licenses for clustering. You can always register a 6 month eval key which might be sufficient for a lab.

[ging84]

proxmox is open source, based on KVM and has a gui, its pretty good, but i'd still go with esxi.

[kev1974]

Thought everyone had moved on from vmware to hyper-v these days, they seem to have in all the companies I go to. The host is free.