What To Do With Free ESXi

[#1]

VMware announced a couple of weeks ago that ESXi was being made available as a free download. There was lots of talk and discussion about what this means. Detailed price analysis have been done. On twitter I have seen several posts where people were downloading, installing, or deploying ESXi. It's twitter so you don't get a lot of detail, but it does seem to indicate that people are doing something with it.

I just wonder exactly what to do with ESXi and does it really change things dramatically.

What you get with the free ESXi download - A high performance enterprise class hypervisor with a web based management tool to create, modify, monitor, and generally do cool stuff with all the VMs that are running on that server. This is a really good deal, especially considering the price.

For a single physical server or maybe a few servers, the free ESXi should be a really great solution.

What is not included is Virtual Center and all of the features of that are multi-server related. This means that there is no VMotion, no HA, no DRS, no multi-server management of any kind.

The great thing is that it is possible to buy the correct licenses (I'll let the license experts handle exactly what this means) and then be able to enable all of these great features with Virtual Center and ESXi. So you can use ESXi as a starting point and grow into a full blown enterprise virtualization solution - later. In many ways this seems to be the same exact thing that VMware did when they made GSX Server free and renamed it to VMware Server. They even renamed ESX 3.5i to be ESXi.

There are some things that I still wonder about. Is ESXi easy enough to use for those just getting started with virtualization? Will ESXi get more SMBs to try out VMware's virtualization?

Todd

[SinghSingh]

There are going to be many sharp minds playing around with ESXi and with that experimentation will come lots of interesting projects\ideas.

I like the idea of using ESXi with mirrored local storage. I think this could be a great offering for SMBs (medical offices, etc) who need uptime and have limited resources for IT management. I was thinking of using Lefthand Networks' VSA or perhaps something like xtravirt's xvs to manage the local storage.

There is a great discussion <a class="jive-link-external" href="http://blogs.vmware.com/vmtn/2008/08/storage-backup.html">here</a>on what could be done with ESXi for the SMB market and the hurdles which must be overcome. (FYI - The title of the discussion is completely different from were the convo ends up)

rajesh singh

[ToddMuirhead]

I agree with you that SMB is probably the most logical place for ESXi. Tackling how to easily setup storage for these limited IT environments is tricky. Using a software based tool like those you mentioned could be the way to go. If the storage is all local, then maybe you don't need anything. Setup RAID (5 or 10 or whatever) and then just partition a big VMFS partition or partitions for everything.

I guess that the thing that kinda gets me is that all of this stuff you can do with ESXi could also be done with VMware Server - both of which are free. And in some ways it might be easier with VMware server because you have a full OS there to help you configure and manage the host. Of course in other ways it is bad for the reason that you have to manage that host OS with VMware Server. Performance should be much better with ESXi, but I don't know that performance is really a big issue.

I want to listen to the podcast that you sent me, but our "Smartfilter" blocks it. I'll check it out from home.

Thanks - Todd

Todd

[headshox]

I have written an article about how to installing ESXi on a PC. It's a great way for people to learn how to use ESX server. Especially in today's market putting VMWare on your resume looks great.

Check it out and I'd love some feedback

http://www.theclosingbrace.com/index.php/2009/02/24/part-1-installing-vmware-esx-for-free/

Thanks

--Ben