VMWare ESXi 3.5 on free download

rick827 · 28 Jul 2008 at 12:01

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.

rick827 · 28 Jul 2008 at 16:06

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.

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

rick827 · 29 Jul 2008 at 11:30

They aren't really losing much revenue by giving ESXi away free anyway. Im sure single node VM servers dont count for many of their sales

rick827 · 30 Jul 2008 at 08:35

oddjob62 said:
There's a limited set of drivers. Have a google around. There are several articles on what "cheaper" hardware you can use.

Like here

rick827 · 4 Aug 2008 at 08:13

drak3 said:
Is there a remote management client also for free?

Yup, once installed open http://esxserver/ and you can download and install the Virtual Infrastructure Client from there. Its got an odd limitation however where you cant clone/create templates so i've had to use VMWare converter to copy the VMs

rick827 · 4 Aug 2008 at 10:28

J1nxy said:
No it doesn't have an odd limitation cloning and templates are a function of Virtual Center.

Yes i know....

I mean it's odd in that they consider it a function more akin to a multi node setup along with HA/DRS etc etc. I'd consider it a pretty important feature of even a single node ESX server and perhaps they stripped ESXi a bit too much.

Putting the advanced features on the VC and charging for this is fine, but templates/cloning on VC-only seems like a spanner in the works of anyone considering a simple setup on a small budget

rick827 · 7 Aug 2008 at 09:32

Pretty good

Support for nvidia based stuff seems good, went on mine without issue -

Asus M2V-somethingorother
(6100NB/430SB)
onboard nforce gbit NIC
4gb ram

Connected to my solaris NAS via iSCSI without trouble too. Beats fighting Xen into shape