VMWare ESXi 3.5 on free download

rick827

rick827

rick827

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Just a heads up for anyone interested, VMWare released the current version of ESXi as a free download from today. Not really relevant to the enterprise market but good news for any SMBs planning on Hyper-V. Still need to open your wallet for HA/DRS/VMotion etc however.
 
Ooooo, interesting.... I was planning on running a VMware ESX single node at home for my virtualised boxes, and was budgeting the £250 or so it costs for an ESX license. I'll take a look to see whaty ou get with this one.
 
From here

What is the difference between VMware ESX and VMware ESXi?

VMware ESX and VMware ESXi are both bare-metal hypervisors that install directly on the server hardware. Both provide industry-leading performance and scalability; the difference resides in the architecture and the operational management of VMware ESXi. VMware ESX relies on a Linux operating system, called the service console, to perform some management functions: executing scripts and installing third party agents for hardware monitoring, backup or systems management. The service console has been removed from ESXi, reducing the footprint to less than 32MB. By removing the Service Console, VMware ESXi completes an ongoing trend of migrating management functionality from this local command line interface to remote management tools. The functionally of the service console is replaced by remote command line interfaces and adherence to system management standards.
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What is the difference between ESXi and VMware Server?

VMware ESXi is an enterprise-class hypervisor that offers a bare-metal architecture for near-native performance, features like memory de-duplication to increase consolidation ratios and a cluster file system for managing VM files on shared storage. VMware ESXi and VMware ESX are the critical foundations for a dynamic and flexible virtual infrastructure.

VMware Server installs as an application on Windows and Linux, relying on an operating system for resource management. This limits the performance and scalability. VMware Server is popular for test and development activities.

Virtual machines created using VMware Server can run on VMware ESXi, but they must first be converted using the free VMware Converter.
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growse said:
Ooooo, interesting.... I was planning on running a VMware ESX single node at home for my virtualised boxes, and was budgeting the £250 or so it costs for an ESX license. I'll take a look to see whaty ou get with this one.
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Same here. Running with DAS then the extra features like DRS and VMotion are lost anyway. Just saved some cash here. As I already work at a place that does VMWare then support isn't an issue to me running at home.
 
growse said:
Ooooo, interesting.... I was planning on running a VMware ESX single node at home for my virtualised boxes, and was budgeting the £250 or so it costs for an ESX license. I'll take a look to see whaty ou get with this one.
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Yup, I run Xensource for mine at the moment (7 CentOS machines). Will be installing ESXi tonight

Edit: If you recently bought ESXi 3.5 from the online store you can get a rebate now
 
It's been predicted for a long time by Gartner et al. Vmotion / HA / DRS are still £££ but for prod usage are pretty much essential for big business....
 
Out of topic, but why do you guys in IT use virtual environments?

I have no experience on this, but I assume you spawn many virtual servers on a single machine.

Users use the services offered by the virtual servers as if each was 1 machine (the traditional way).

Lets say the web server needs an upgrade, you clone the server throw in the patches and test it right away. If it works, you just direct trafic to the clone and decomission the current?

These are ideas I made up now, correct me if I am wrong :p
 
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Its a shame they didnt release this sooner has I now have a 2008 Hyper-V setup at work running the DC, Exchange 2007 and Sharepoint Services 3

Also seems quite a strict hardware list, certainly a lot less then ESX
 
RLBUHT said:
How come theyre giving it away for free?
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I should imagine it's all about exposure, getting people playing with vmware ESX before they start working for a company that can afford it (students etc) means that when those people DO have a say in a company environment, they are more likley to go with what they are familiar with, in this case ESX, over competitors.

//TrX
 
RLBUHT said:
How come theyre giving it away for free?
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Microsoft now supply Hyper-V free with 2008, Citrix now supply XenServer free for a single instance, Virtual Iron give a free single server license...all of these are hyper-visor based Virtualisation systems VMware didn't have a free offering in that space so they do what the others do and give a basic version free. From a testing and evaluation stand point if they didn't do that they'd start to have their market share eroded. This gives the likes of us a chance to work with the products prior to stepping up to the full Enterprise scale versions with HA, Vmotion and other nice functionality.
 
drak3 said:
Looked it up, very nice :)

Moving the server to another machine praying it won't die before 100% must be quite fun :p
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A move usually doesn't take much more than 30secs, all that needs to be "moved" is the active memory really.

It's more useful as part of DRS (move VMs to different hosts in order to maintain full availability of resources) and HA (restart VMs on different host in the event of a host failure)
 
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