The free ESXi licence and I had reached the end of our relationship. It served me well for years as the hypervisor under the rack, but the free tier is a deliberately limited thing: no API worth using without paying, a vSphere client that wants a specific Windows or a fiddly web UI, and a backup story that amounts to "buy the proper version." For a homelab, every one of those is friction I am paying with my own evenings.
So this weekend I wiped the host and put Proxmox VE on it instead.
why proxmox won
The honest answer is that Proxmox does the things I actually do without asking me to upgrade. It runs both KVM virtual machines and LXC containers from the same web UI, which matters more than I expected: half my workloads are perfectly happy as containers, and containers are cheaper than a full VM for a service that is really just one daemon and a config file.
ZFS is built in. I can create a pool at install time, get snapshots and send/receive for free, and stop pretending the hardware RAID card was a good idea. Snapshots before an upgrade, rollback when the upgrade goes sideways, all from the same interface. That alone changed how recklessly I am willing to try things, which for a homelab is the entire point.
Backups are part of the product, not an upsell. vzdump to an NFS share on a schedule, no extra licence, no third-party agent. I set it once and stopped thinking about it.
the migration itself
It was less dramatic than I feared. The VMs were already on shared storage, so the actual work was exporting each one to OVF, then importing the disks under Proxmox and rebuilding the VM definition by hand. Tedious, not hard. A couple of guests needed their network interface name sorting out because the virtual hardware changed underneath them, the usual eth0 becoming something else dance. An hour of fiddling, no data lost.
what i miss
I will be fair: vMotion was genuinely good, and Proxmox's live migration, while real, wants shared storage and a cluster to shine, which is more than my single host gives it. And ESXi's hardware compatibility list is its own kind of comfort. Proxmox is Debian underneath, so if your NIC or HBA is happy on Linux you are fine, but you are now responsible for knowing that.
None of which made me reconsider. The rack does more now, costs me nothing in licences, and every knob I want is reachable from one page. For a homelab that is the whole brief, and Proxmox met it without a single nag screen.