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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.
Website Hosting
Maybe that's why TFS said "free", rather than "FREE"?
Caveat Utilitor
(H)igh (A)vailability and (D)istributed (R)esource (S)cheduler.
And just in case you couldn't tell that we're spelling out an abbreviation, not only have we capitalized the letters, we've added parentheses around each one as well!
slashdot apparently is a guerrilla marketing site. Who knew?
*raises hand*
This guy's the limit!
The ad got the product name wrong, it's suppose to be iESX.
They should've just called it VMware SEXi. "I need to go fiddle with the SEXi server."
This guy's the limit!
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.
Yes, let's get into arguments about what free is. Cause it's not like one could successfully argue (depending on one's precise definition of free) that GPL, BSD, $0, any of that, is/is not free. Come on, man, get off your high horse.
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
Look buddy. If I don't have to pay for it, by definition of what I have learned "free" to be my whole life, it is free.
"Free" as in, "short for freedom" is not, and shall never be, the default value of this term in my head. When you go to the store and get a "free sample", they are talking about cost. If I were to go to McDonalds for a promotion of "Free McNugget Wednesdays", you can bet I'll have a happy little lawsuit when they actually try to charge me and claim "It is free in that you can do whatever you want with it!"
I thought it was iSEX, maybe a new...Apple ummm...nevermind
use your turn signal! you people act like it's divulging information to the enemy
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?
Check out my sysadmin blog!
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 mean "their" business model, not "there" business model; the latter word refers to location, while the former refers to possession.
They're VMware. They have plenty of products they charge (lots and lots of) money for; giving away low-end freebies isn't going to hurt their bottom line much, as anyone running a QA department will want to have the management tools &c. that come with the full releases, without needing a developer to write local toolage (which can be even more expensive, after opportunity cost for the staff involved is taken into account).
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.
If I were to go to McDonalds for a promotion of "Free McNugget Wednesdays", you can bet I'll have a happy little lawsuit when they actually try to charge me and claim "It is free in that you can do whatever you want with it!"
Yeah, I threatened to sue when the local market wanted me to pay for their so-called "Free Range Chickens".
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).
Range Chickens? What, are these replacing clay pigeons?
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
"It is unfortunate that the word "free" in English has such multiple meanings."
Yeah, there should be like regulations and laws against that, who are we to look for alternate meanings, keep these language pirates from stealing our sources.
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.
ESXi and for that matter ESX will run on a variety of non qualified hardware. (Unsupported of course.) It will be interesting to see what kind of compatibility list people are able to come up with. It can't be worse than, say, the early days of Linux and 802.11 ....
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...
But riding my high horse is free! So I ride him everywhere because of high gas prices.
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
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?
But you're playing right into the hands of big hay!
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