Phase 7 — Migration out of VMware

Because; Broadcom.

Migration off the VMware infrastructure and onto Proxmox VE. Following the Broadcom acquisition, licensing that was previously free or low-cost for a small lab rose dramatically, making the current setup untenable at renewal.

This phase was brought forward. It was originally scheduled last, after stabilisation. A storage fault on one of the three hosts repeatedly took the management cluster offline — consumer drives sitting under a workload that needs enterprise ones — and rebuilding that storage means rebuilding the host anyway. Doing it on VMware would have been work thrown away, so the migration moved to the front of the queue.

Expect scheduled downtime. Hosts are converted one at a time and every window is announced before it happens.

Started August 2026 · renumbered from Phase 8.