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."

Comments

more info.

[stoolpigeon]

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.

Re:more info.

[nabsltd]

ESX or ESXi works just fine with a bunch of plain old IDE and SATA controllers...see here for more information.

You can't put virtual machines on an IDE drive, but you can put them on SATA disks with the controllers listed at that link. You don't get RAID on any of them, though, even if they have some sort of RAID available. ESX(i) only officially supports storing VMs on RAID arrays if the disks appear to be SCSI of some sort (including SAS, or SATA on an SAS-capable controller).

You could also use Openfiler to create iSCSI targets that ESXi can use to store VMs, and Openfiler can use any storage that any modern Linux can use, including Linux software RAID. This allows you to have a VMware ESX(i) setup permanently (ESX was available as a free 90-day trial) on some pretty cheap hardware.

Re:more info.

[Anonymous Coward]

"3.9 Audit Rights. You will maintain accurate records as to your use of the Software as authorized by this Agreement, for at least two (2) years from the last day on which support and subscription services ("Services") expired for the applicable Software. VMware, or persons designated by VMware, will, at any time during the period when you are obliged to maintain such records, be entitled to inspect such records and your computing devices, in order to verify that the Software is used by you in accordance with the terms of this Agreement..."

No wonder no one wants to read the EULA.

They don't want the VMware SWAT team busting in on them to see if they're using free software in accordance with the license.

Re:more info.

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't even need to mess with iSCSI if you don't want to: ESXi can use a plain old NFS NAS. That's not exactly a stretch.

As I've already pointed out, ESXi also runs quite happily on a bunch of bog-standard SCSI controllers like the Adaptec AIC7xxx range, so you don't even need remote storage of any kind, and certainly not an enterprise class SAN.

Re:more info.

[Anonymous Coward]

If YOU knew the first thing about VMWare ESX YOU'D know that they use almost unmodified Linux drivers, and any device supported by the driver will work under ESX and ESXi just as well as it will work under Linux.

Not to mention if YOU were actually reading the thread YOU'D know that the GGP is complaining that he has to buy a $250 "Enterprise class" SAS controller and have a server with PCI-X slots in it, which is total crap. The only reason he thinks this is because the ZDNet blogger who wrote the "review" the GGP read is an idiot who has some weird fixation with SAS and totally ignores all the other available, cheaper and less troublesome storage options such as SCSI or an NFS mounted NAS.

Last but not least, you said it yourself: VMWare only support various certified platforms, but don't expect to get much support for ESXi anyway. ESXi will be fine in an enterprise setup you need a scratch server, or have a spare "supported" server lying around so you can be sure it will work. If you're expecting to throw ESXi on any old bit of whitebox crap and get enterprise quality server out of it, you're delusional. At the same time, whining that you can't setup a simple whitebox machine and run ESXi on it for your own uses because you have to buy a $250 SAS controller first is just uninformed crap.

But thanks for playing.

Another download link

[clang_jangle]

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.

awesome...

[teknopurge]

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.

The First One is Free, Kid

[SuperBanana]

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.

Re:The First One is Free, Kid

[JayGuerette]

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.

When you're running 10-20 virtual servers on a single ESX host and look at the hardware cost, space & resource consumption, and management costs of 10-20 physical servers.... this suddenly looks cheap. We're running 100+ ESX hosts... this is an *extremely* cost-effective solution.

Re:The First One is Free, Kid

[hal9000(jr)]

You can find a FAQ.

I haven't looked at ESXi in depth. The biggest missing component I see 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 looks like you have plenty of time to install ESXi and play with it. As long as your virtual servers aren't resource hogs, you can save bundles in hardware. If you step up to ESX and Virtual Ifrastructure, you can manage all your VM's through a single server. You can move, with VMotion VM's from one hypervisor to another (running, if they are using the same SAN), take snapshots (and restore!) of running machines live. virtualizaiton makes your life so much easier.

Guess I am a bit of a fan-boi.

Re:Replying to myself

[jeffmeden]

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.

Re:ESXi and Virtual Center

[moogoogaipan]

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.

Re:Replying to myself

[Feyr]

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

Re:Still no Firewire support?

[mccabem]

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

Re:Replying to myself

[martums]

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.