I ran ESXi at home for the better part of seven years. It was rock solid, the free hypervisor licence kept it cheap, and once a VM was up I rarely had to think about it. I had no real reason to move. Then Broadcom finished acquiring VMware, and over the course of this year the writing on the wall got harder to ignore: the free standalone ESXi tier quietly went away, partner programmes got reshuffled, and the general direction of travel was clearly towards large enterprise subscriptions rather than a bloke with a box in a cupboard.
None of that affected my existing install directly. It still booted, still ran my VMs. But I don't like building my homelab on a platform that's actively signalling it doesn't want me there, and the prospect of being stuck on an old build with no path forward made the decision for me. So I migrated everything to Proxmox VE over a couple of weekends, and I should have done it years ago.
why proxmox specifically
I'd looked at the alternatives more than once. XCP-ng was the obvious other candidate, and it's genuinely good, but Proxmox won on two practical points. First, it does both full VMs (KVM) and LXC containers in one interface, and a fair chunk of my workload is happier as a lightweight container than a full VM. Second, ZFS is a first-class citizen, built into the installer, integrated with the snapshot and replication tooling. I was already running ZFS for storage and bolting it onto ESXi had always felt like a workaround.
It's also just Debian underneath. That sounds like a small thing and it absolutely is not. When something goes wrong on Proxmox, I'm in a Linux shell I understand, reading logs in the places I expect them, using tools I already know. ESXi's console was always a slightly alien environment where my usual instincts didn't apply.
the migration itself
The honest version is that I didn't migrate so much as rebuild, and I think that was the right call. I had a clean inventory of what every VM did, because I'd been disciplined about that, so rather than wrestle disk format conversions I stood Proxmox up on a spare disk, rebuilt the important VMs fresh, and copied data across.
For the handful of VMs I genuinely wanted to lift wholesale, the path was exporting to OVF from the ESXi side and importing the resulting disks. Proxmox has an importer, and qm importdisk will take a VMDK and attach it to a new VM:
qm create 110 --name webvm --memory 4096 --cores 2 --net0 virtio,bridge=vmbr0
qm importdisk 110 /mnt/import/webvm-disk1.vmdk local-zfs
qm set 110 --scsihw virtio-scsi-pci --scsi0 local-zfs:vm-110-disk-0
The gotcha, and there's always one, was the network drivers. VMware's VMXNET3 adapter obviously isn't present under KVM, so anything that had hard-coded interface names needed the config nudging to virtio and a new predictable name. Twenty minutes of confusion until I remembered that the interface had simply been renamed inside the guest. Once I switched the imported guests to virtio NICs and fixed up their netplan, they came straight up.
The other thing worth flagging: don't forget the guest agent. Install qemu-guest-agent inside each VM and enable it in the VM options. Without it, Proxmox can't cleanly quiesce or shut down guests, and your nice orderly host reboots turn into a row of hard power-offs. I forgot on the first two and noticed when a backup snapshot caught a database mid-write.
what's better, what i miss
What's better is mostly the integration. Snapshots, scheduled backups to a Proxmox Backup Server instance, and replication between nodes are all built in and all speak ZFS natively. The backup story in particular is far ahead of what I was cobbling together before. Deduplicated, incremental, verifiable backups with a sensible retention policy, configured once and then ignored. That alone justified the move.
The web UI is fine. It's not as polished as vSphere was, and the first few days I kept reaching for menus that weren't where my muscle memory expected. But it exposes more, hides less, and never once tried to upsell me.
What do I miss? Honestly, not much. ESXi's hardware compatibility was famously fussy and Proxmox just took whatever I threw at it, including a consumer NIC that ESXi had refused to acknowledge for years. The one thing I'll concede is that VMware's documentation and the sheer weight of community answers for obscure problems was unmatched, simply because so many enterprises ran it. Proxmox's community is excellent but smaller, so the truly weird problems take a bit more digging.
A fortnight in, the rack is quieter, the backups are better, and I'm no longer building on a foundation that's pricing out hobbyists. If you're still on free ESXi at home and wondering whether to jump, my advice is to do it on your own schedule rather than waiting to be forced. The migration is a weekend. The peace of mind is ongoing.