Alternatives to VMware ESXi baremetal hypervisor

[Halcyon]

I realise I can Google for a list, but I'd like to hear what you guys run and your personal thoughts. I'm currently running ESXi on actual server hardware at home. Over the years I've found it to be generally quite good, but it can be a bit flakey and have some weird issues. So much so, I had to blow away an entire installation about 4 months ago and completely reinstall ESXi.

The latest of those issues is following an update (to patch some Intel CPU vulnerabilities); Machines have all of a sudden started to behave oddly. Sometimes machines won't communicate on the network, sometimes they do, other times VMs fail to start or stop (sitting there indefinitely in some weird "neither started nor stopped" state) until I rebooted the entire hypervisor. Even the CLI commands to force a machine to stop don't work.

These issues don't just occur with a particular VM, it changes and I know it's not the VM itself as they haven't changed at all.

I can't have this kind of weirdness happening on my home network, particularly because one of the VM's is my gateway machine.

What do you guys recommend as free alternatives to VMware ESXi? It needs to be able to run Windows, Linux and FreeBSD VM's and support hardware pass-through for things like NICs.

[Ampera]

KVM/bhyve + LibVirt running on <insert linux/unix distro here>

[jhalar]

Using XCP-ng hypervisor on a Dell R710 12 core server running Linux and Windows servers.

[olkipukki]

proxmox
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxmox_Virtual_Environment


Also, using this on desktop, PCI passthrough allows dedicated GPUs for Windows 10