VMware ESXi for free

According to InformationWeek, VMware ESXi will be available for free from July 28th. Previously priced at $495, the battle with Microsoft Hyper-V has made VMware to release the ESXi as a free download. As a fan of VMware, I am happy to say that this is a bold move. ESXi is an enterprise virtualization solution running without an extra operating system. As you probably know, to run Hyper-V you need WIndows Server 2008. This operating system is pretty expensive ($999). So, the previous price of $495 was a bargain if you do not need the Windows Server to run applications. Needless to say, the new price is unbeatable!

VMware ESXi is the old ESX server without the service console. It can be installed to a disk drive or you can boot it from a USB stick or from flash memory. With a footprint of only 32MB you do not lose disk space to unimportant stuff you do not use anyway. The performance is great, and the administration is pretty easy due to the integration with VMware Infrastructure.

Sadly, you still need to pay for the VMware VirtualCenter to be able to use all the cool stuff such as VMotion, VMware HA and DRS. You also have to use VirtualCenter if you want to manage your entire datacenter within a single client application. The VirtualCenter solution is pretty cool, although it is too expensive for students as myself which plays around with the software to learn instead of saving money by reducing the number of servers in an organization.

It is easy to make recommandations if you want to play around with virtualization: Get VMware ESXi on July 28th for free. There are no real alternatives on the market today unless you want another operating system together with your virtualization solution. If so, there are a number of alternatives for free: VMware Server, KVM and Xen for example.

As a sidenote: VMWare, your hostname (little-black-box.vmware.com) keeps showing up in my web statistics. Can you give me a license for VirtualCenter to support this blog? :-)