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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."
Agreed. VMware has Microsoft totally beat in terms of what you can do with virtualization. I was able to set up an environment of clustered machines for testing an Exchange Active-Active cluster and it worked flawlessly (though it did require some fiddling with the vmx files). I asked a Microsoft guy about doing something similar and they said that it wasn't possible. Frankly, VirtualPC is a joke (no unlimited snapshots? No private LAN segments? No thanks.) and without the flexibility of their server product, I can't believe Microsoft actually thinks its a contender in this space.
Basically, Microsoft is hoping to leverage their Windows monopoly to push a substandard product down everyone's throats (again).
This isn't a smart-assed comment, but what does this version do?
I've got an enclosure of 10 PowerEdge 1955s that I have ~ 6months to play with until I need to make them production servers. I'm sorely tempted to use this, but I'm unfamiliar with the ESX product line. What does this ESXi do for me?
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I checked out the datasheet here(PDF), and ESXi is just the small-footprint operating system on-top of which you can run multiple virtual machines.
So instead of having a fullblown Windows/Linux installation, you install this, and the smaller footprint leaves more resources for the guest OSes.
Am I right? And what is the software that you need to manage ESXi?
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That's been a showstopper standing between us and vmware forever. Maybe it is finally supported, but I RTFA, then I even went and RTFWS and I couldn't find any mention of Firewire or IEEE 1394 (a or b).
HyperV is also Xen aware. I played with it for a short period when RC1 was released, but was totally dissatisfied with it. I don't think VMWare has much to worry about as HyperV was not ready for production in my opinion at the time.
I was able to install Xen kernels in Fedora and CentOS without a problem in HyperV, but could not for the life of me get w2k3 or w2k8 to install, while both install without issue in my Xen cluster. Virtual Server 2005 was a far better product from Microsoft, but still way lacking as it required windows as the base OS.
Another lacking part I found with HyperV was poor ethernet support for *nix, limited to a realtech driver at 100Mbit. I really don't think enterprise clients will adopt HyperV for the one main reason of support though, it only officially supports SUSE, and if big enterprise clients can not purchase support for other linux distro's, they are not going to waste their time on Microsofts product.
Being a spelling & grammar Nazi is a sign you do not poses the intelligence to contribute to the conversation
Embedded ESX supports a large subset of the VI API (basically, everything that a standalone host can give you). You can write Perl or Java to your heart's content and get ESXi to jump through hoops. Virtual Center uses the VI API and it's quite possible you can write something you enjoy better. Go check out the Virtual Infrastructure SDK.
We currently have 5 dial-quadcore ESX 3.0.1 hosts attached to a SAN, two others in our DMZ which are stand-alone, and were tossing up whether to get two more. This has now made it a no brainer as previously we had to way up the cost of an ESX dual cpu licence against buying 2 or three smaller servers. Now this means we just keep buying our standard server kit with stacks of RAM and just install ESXi anyway, even if it will only be one guest. We were about to purchase a New SAN and iSCSI was on the required feature list, so we'll probaby just add iSCSI cards into the mix for standard servers, and just purchase HA and DRS licences. I've been using VMWare server at home now for over a year, and is perfect for servers which wont support ESX. I just use a console only install of Suse 10.2 as the host OS. Runs my 5 guest servers (SLES10 server for mail, iFolder server appliance downloaded from the VMare marketplace, ISPConfig for a web/dev server and OpenFiler for storage/NAS) just fine for home use on a 1.2 GHz AMD CPU with 4GB RAM.