VMWare ESXi for free!

Not sure if you guys are aware of this. I only found out because I went to the VMWare forum here in Atlanta last week. Starting today VMWare ESXi is now free.

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dynamik

Wow! I guess they're planning on making their money off of Virtual Center and licensing for other features like Vmotion.

https://www.vmware.com/tryvmware/login.php?eval=esxi&t=1

scheistermeister

SCHWEET! A new toy to play with!

Technowiz

dynamik wrote:

Wow! I guess they're planning on making their money off of Virtual Center and licensing for other features like Vmotion.

https://www.vmware.com/tryvmware/login.php?eval=esxi&t=1

Yep this doesn't give you much in the way of management tools. It's that functionality like vmotion, vstorage, HA, etc that you will be paying for. But for anyone like those of us making a lab just wanting to throw some vm's on a box with a true bare metal hypervisor this is great! And... it's a thumb in the eye to Microsoft.

dynamik

scheistermeister wrote:

SCHWEET! A new toy to play with!

Keep in mind that it still does have the rigid HW requirements of ESX. It's not nearly as flexible as Server or Workstation.

Technowiz wrote:

Yep this doesn't give you much in the way of management tools. It's that functionality like vmotion, vstorage, HA, etc that you will be paying for. But for anyone like those of us making a lab just wanting to throw some vm's on a box with a true bare metal hypervisor this is great! And... it's a thumb in the eye to Microsoft.

Actually, I think it's more in response to MS's Hyper-V. ESX is clearly a superior product, but Hyper-V is free and does what it's supposed to.

I'm going to stick with the trial of the installable ESX myself. It gives you 60 days with EVERYTHING enabled, so you can practice Vmotion, DRS, etc. Virtual Center is also good for 60 days. I'd rather have full functionality with the downside of having to reinstall six times a year.

Technowiz

Yeah free if you don't count the cost of a Server 2008 license.

This is perfect timing because I'm trying to push virtualization where I work and they just bought a new server that we were going to run vmware server on as they weren't ready to fork out the money for ESX.