So as of the Broadcom acquisition, ESXi is no longer the recommended route for anything, but especially not personal self hosted projects.
Instead, proxmox is a good, free, open source hypervisor alternative. One nice thing about it is that because it’s really linux under the hood, you can just directly host docker containers in proxmox. I would say that is the recommended route if you have a spare machine available.
If you don't have a spare machine available and want to host on your machine, then you can use docker on Windows with WSL, or you can create a Ubuntu VM, and use that. If you have no linux experience I’d recommend going the Ubuntu desktop route for a VM. While Ubuntu server is lightweight, it’s also a huge learning curve going from a full service GUI to foreign CLI-only OS, that has many fewer guardrails.
I also was only familiar with Windows, and found Ubuntu server to be kinda overwhelming. It’s kinda like being dropped in the middle of the pacific and told to swim to the nearest shore, but you don’t have a GPS or food, and only the stars to guide you. After spending a few months with desktop I was able to graduate to cli only, tho I do still sometimes pine for that familiar GUI.
> Instead, proxmox is a good, free, open source hypervisor alternative.
I got the impression from all their "enterprise" branding that it wasn't, however based your claim I went digging and found that it's AGPLv3 and they do have a CLA but they allege the submitter retains the copyright, which my IANAL interpretation should(!) prevent rug pulls
Instead, proxmox is a good, free, open source hypervisor alternative. One nice thing about it is that because it’s really linux under the hood, you can just directly host docker containers in proxmox. I would say that is the recommended route if you have a spare machine available.
If you don't have a spare machine available and want to host on your machine, then you can use docker on Windows with WSL, or you can create a Ubuntu VM, and use that. If you have no linux experience I’d recommend going the Ubuntu desktop route for a VM. While Ubuntu server is lightweight, it’s also a huge learning curve going from a full service GUI to foreign CLI-only OS, that has many fewer guardrails.
I also was only familiar with Windows, and found Ubuntu server to be kinda overwhelming. It’s kinda like being dropped in the middle of the pacific and told to swim to the nearest shore, but you don’t have a GPS or food, and only the stars to guide you. After spending a few months with desktop I was able to graduate to cli only, tho I do still sometimes pine for that familiar GUI.