Can someone explain to me VMware's server product lineup?

[Major_Disaster]

Hey,

As i understood it, ESX was the enterprise virtulisation hypervisor, and ESXi was the stripped down (and free) version. Virtual Infrastructure was a management addon to ESX.

Then vSphere was released, and then i got confused. Does vSpehere simply replace ESX? And ESXi 4 replace ESXi 3.5?

Then, with regards to vSphere, you either have the Small Business or Large Enterprise sub sections. In these sections you then have various editions?

Is ESXi 4 still a decent product? Or is it now worth looking at the cheaper vSphere editions?

Any general comments / chatter would be much appreciated. Im just generally interested.

Cheers

 

[iaind]

Virtual infrastructure isnt a management addon - the management tool is VirtualCenter.

Virtual infrastructure is the entire suite of products, the hypervisor, the management server and the addon modules (DRS, vMotion, HA etc etc) - the different editions have different modules.

vSphere is just the new name for VI - it's the suite of products. ESXi is a good product, but its relatively limited compared to the potential you can achieve with the full product. If you just want to consolidate a few servers onto one host then fine - but once you get into more serious multi host environments you want the full product

 

[mdjmcnally]

There are two versions of ESXi, a free version, and a full on version that allows full use of the VI3 system or vSphere system.

vSphere or VMWare 4.0 also contains a regular ESX and ESXi product.

ESX has a system console allowing manipulation via an SSH console.

ESXi has no system console and requires the RCLI to make changes to the base server.

 

[Skidilliplop]

There are two versions of ESXi, a free version, and a full on version that allows full use of the VI3 system or vSphere system.

vSphere or VMWare 4.0 also contains a regular ESX and ESXi product.

ESX has a system console allowing manipulation via an SSH console.

ESXi has no system console and requires the RCLI to make changes to the base server.

I ought to add that within the bought product there are several flavours each with a different feature set. E.g Basic doesn't have vMotion, Advanced does.

You can get into the CLI on ESXi using a key combination at the console. Though it is only intedned for VMWare support techs to use and you shouldn't really go messing in there if you have a support agreement.