A Love Letter to Verge.io
November 2025 · by David Vincent · Homelab Adventures
The Breakup
For years, VMware felt like home. It was the foundation beneath countless late-night builds, snapshots, and experiments. It was stable, predictable, and familiar — everything an admin could ask for.
Then Broadcom walked in and rearranged the furniture. Prices went up, licensing got murky, and the culture shifted over time. Suddenly it wasn’t about innovation or community anymore; it was about consolidation and contracts. VMware became a place for the biggest players only — and the rest of us, the tinkerers and builders, were left standing outside.
That was the moment I realized: home had changed.
The Courtship
It started innocently enough — one night, watching 2GuysTek on YouTube. Rich was interviewing Jason Yaeger, Verge.io’s head of product development. I wasn’t looking for a new hypervisor. I just wanted to see what was happening out there.
But fifteen minutes in, something clicked. The architecture was unified, the language simple, the philosophy different. Verge.io wasn’t another VMware clone — it was a clean slate.
Then came a surprise — the ISO isn’t publicly downloadable. According to their excellent documentation, access is available upon request. So I did what any curious homelabber would: I fired off a quick email from my work address, fingers crossed and hoping for the best.
By the next day, my inbox had a friendly reply and a download link. That was all I needed to get started.
[UPDATE: the link to the ISO is available on this page] you will need to reach out to [email protected] to start a trial
The First Date
The install process felt familiar — an ISO, a few prompts, the usual. But what came next was refreshingly different. There was no vCenter to set up, no post-install dependency chain, and licensing was handled simply through their subscription service and login process. Verge.io came alive on the first boot.
The interface was clean, direct, and logical — the kind of UI that respects your time. Within minutes, I was building my first VMs using their built-in templates (they call them recipes), and for the first time in a while, I smiled while provisioning.
The Z440 Experiment
I didn’t go all-in right away. Verge.io recommends multi-node clusters, but this was just a test — a fling before commitment.
My testbed? An HP Z440 workstation with 256 GB of RAM, an Intel PCIe SSD, and a Mellanox ConnectX-5 25 Gb NIC feeding a Brocade ICX-6610. A beast — and a power-hungry one at that.
But it booted clean, ran smooth, and gave me the sense that something special was happening under the hood. It wasn’t flashy; it was efficient, purposeful, and fast.
Falling in Love
This is where Verge.io truly won me over.
I’m an NSX nerd — I love elegant network abstraction and well-behaved overlays. But Verge.io didn’t need a separate appliance, a controller, or a week of prep work to make SDN magic happen. It’s built right in.
I could spin up internal networks, define routing, and isolate tenants — all from the same interface that handled my compute and storage. It just worked. No sprawling management planes, no brittle integrations, no headache inducing complexity
It felt like someone finally designed infrastructure the way it should be.
No Love Is Perfect
Every relationship has its learning curve. Verge.io speaks its own dialect: tenants, sites, internal and external networks. The terminology threw me for a loop at first.
But honestly? That mental work was nothing compared to the Everest-sized complexity of VCF 9. Verge.io may have new words, but they map to ideas that make sense. And once you learn the language, the simplicity underneath shines through.
I’ll happily trade endless product matrices and sprawling dashboards for this kind of clarity any day of the week.
Coming Home
During my trial, Verge.io quietly became home. It’s now where I do everything — testing new operating systems, experimenting with Kubernetes (especially RKE2), and running the small but mighty experiments that keep my homelab alive. Even this very blog, Homelab Adventures, is hosted on that same HP Z440, putting the environment through its paces and proving just how capable Verge.io really is.
For the first time in a long while, I feel settled. No uncertainty, no sense that I’m running software on borrowed time. The environment has been simple to manage, and support from the Verge.io team has been excellent.
When I boot into Verge.io, it feels like coming home. After years of chaos and corporate churn, here’s a platform that just works — elegantly, quietly, completely. It doesn’t fight me; it empowers me.
The Future
I don’t know where this story goes next. Maybe more learning the Verge API to automate my VM and Kubernetes deployments
Like most of my adventures, I don’t always look before I leap. But I’ve heard that a version of VergeOS for the homelab is in the works — and in the meantime, I’m crossing my fingers for an NFR license to keep the dream alive! 😉
But I know this: VMware was the past. Verge.io is the present.
And for the first time in a long while… I’m at peace with my hypervisor
Yours truly,
David Vincent
Homelab Adventures — blog.homelabadventures.com