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VMware ESXi Available For Free Starting Today
Mierdaan writes "VMware's bare-metal hypervisor is available for free starting today. ESXi, which can either be installed or run from an embedded device available in certain servers, has a 32MB footprint and gives small businesses an easy way to get into the virtualization world, with easy upgrade paths to enterprise-level features such as (H)igh (A)vailability and (D)istributed (R)esource (S)cheduler. ESXi runs on most any hardware with a server-class disk controller, and previously retailed for $495. VMware is obviously shooting to prevent Microsoft's Hyper-V technology from gaining a foothold in the marketplace."
This zdnet blogger already gave it a spin on some commodity-like hardware (which it seems to me there might be a few here who will be so inclined) and has a nice write-up of the results as well as some good tips on how to avoid some trouble spots for those not fortunate enough to be putting this on enterprise level hardware.
Downloading the ISO does require creating an account with a ton of required fields - so there are a few minutes of typing involved. There is also the usual eula to agree too, which I need to go over before I do anything with the disc image I've downloaded.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
Oh, this is going to be fun, I can hardly wait! BTW the download link in TFA appears to be broken, you can get it here.
Caveat Utilitor
In our testing VMWare is by far the best performing VM platform out there, especially on the networking benchmarks. This is nothing but a good thing.
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Don't mind the $2500 per-physical-machine-maximum-2-cpus price tag on the version which actually lets you do stuff, like manage the machines, migrate them, share storage, etc.
Please help metamoderate.
To sell you the features that extend it, such as management, hot migration to other machines, etc. The ESXi is cool, but a very, very base product. If you start playing with it, you will want to pay for all the features that go along with ESX to manage, deploy, etc..
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
You are right. The management software you want is Virtual Center (included as part of ESXi). The only thing you lack is the advanced management features such as automated high availability.
Just found this out: To use ESXi with VC you would need to purchase ESX Foundation Oh well, still, I'll try it w/o Virtual Center.
Technically in English, "free" has no default value. If you want to avoid ambiguity, you have to say something like "free of charge"
You mean as in "VMware ESXi Available For Free"?
their ESX software is an hypervisor that you must install directly on the hardware to start with. if you want to run linux/win under it, you need to get vmware server.
ESXi seems to be ESX without the "service console" (a linux console that runs virtually that lets you manage stuff on the esx server)
to manage it you need the VI client which you can download on their site. it's the same client for all of their software (except vmware server, because it sucks)
VI client is, sadly, windows only
There is no Firewire for servers or workstations.
There's just Firewire like there's just USB. He's talking about Firewire support in VMware like there's USB support in VMware.
-Matt
Also you can surf the web for other management applications written using the VI API. There are some out there already and I think that the release of ESXi will really accelerate this. Which is a good thing because VC could use a kick in the pants (would be good for VMware too).
BTW there is a limited built-in web management interface.
For my work we wanted to setup a HA cluster with 2 (or at worse 3) servers running both a Linux and Windows environment for some DRM stuff. So after years of just toying with VMWare server and simple VMs like that, I finally jumped into the wonderful world of hypervisors.
I of course first tried the open source solutions, and boy was that a nightmare. First Xen, on a DRBD+OCFS2+Heartbeat environment. Never managed to get it to be stable, got either kernel panic from OCFS after some time, or the servers would hang when doing live migrations. Also tried the iSCSI way, and still no way to stabilize the thing.
Then since I though the issue was with the only officially supported Xen kernel (2.6.18) I tried KVM since it's integrated into the mainline kernel. Well surprise, I got more or less the exact same result. Kernel panic when trying the migrate a VM...
So I gave ESX a try, not really believing it would be any better. Well, it actually works, but while it was easier to set up than KVM/Xen for HA and stuff like that, it sure wasn't trivial either. I spent a lot of time on google researching the various issues I was having (who would think that you HAVE to use the names of the machines and not their IPs when setting up the HA stuff?), but at least I got it to work. The accounting people sure aren't happy with it though...
There are many setups that should work, but don't. I have used the following extensively, and in production, so maybe it can help.
/dev/guests/1 on both machines).
On each node I setup LVM, from which I can allocate logical volumes for the guests (e.g. guest 1 gets
I then use DRBD to mirror the logical volumes, so yes, there can be quite a lot of DRBD devices - one per guest.
For OpenVZ the DRBDs get ext3 (so quota works) and it is mounted on the node running the guest. This doesn't support live migration, instead I suspend to disk, copy the dump, and restore it on the other machine. With the intermediate steps of unmounting, switching primaries, and mounting this takes about 5 seconds.
For KVM the guests just use the DRBDs directly. I enable dual primary which lets me do live migrations over TCP. This is extremely fast, fast enough that it would be appropriate for load balancing.
One notable benefit of this system, as opposed to cluster file systems, is that there is no locking across the network. Each logical volume is "owned" by one node at a time, so there is no need for synchronizing access for every read or write.
Seen too many options yet?
their ESX software is an hypervisor that you must install directly on the hardware to start with. if you want to run linux/win under it, you need to get vmware server.
I disagree with the last part of what you said. The VMware Server product will let you run one or more virtual machines on top of Linux or Windows. ESXi has no underlying host OS, and is (supposed to be) a bare metal hypervisor, (god, I hate that word), allowing you to run one or more virtual machines on the bare metal, using only the hypervisor, (Without Windows or Linux booting first. The ongoing debate of whether ESX or ESXi leverages any *nix is not for me to engage in). VMware Server is a completely different product as opposed to ESX and ESXi. And now that both VMware Server and ESXi are available free, seems like VMware Server just became the red-headed stepchild.
ESX does not require VMware Server. Two separate products, now both available free of charge.
VMware Server might be a cheap alternative if you can't shell out the $300 for Workstation. The latter of which, is worth every penny.
Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety
is the lack of a service console--no command line. I have a few Dell 2550(?) that for some reason have CDrom issues that I need console access for.
It is possible, though unsupported, to SSH in to ESXi. This doesn't have the same functionality as the service console, as you're probably aware. It's enabled on one or more of the ESXi servers we use, (for development, not production, lest the flames ensue), and is handy in a pinch. Paul Lalonde posted instructions in the community at http://communities.vmware.com/message/881978;jsessionid=529C6EC4C2DAD952438F591A8052BBBB quoting his instructions...
HTH
Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety