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

Re:awesome...

[mitgib]

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.