As reported in the previous post, ESXi will be avaiable for free on July 28th. As this is great news for all the virtualization geeks and sysadmins out there, I would like to share some of my experiences with ESXi.
First of all, installation is a piece of cake: Boot with the CD (I haven’t tried to boot the installation from iSCSI or network yet), press return a few times, watch the server reboot and you’re done. Configurating the server is just as easy, the administration interface is clean and self explaining. As long as all your hardware is supported by ESXi, the installation should be done in just a few minutes.
As ESXi lacks the service console, you don’t have the option of installing a bunch of administration software from your hardware vendor. I don’t miss those features as the ESXi have a hardware monitor service installed which is available from the VirtualCenter Infrastructure Client. As most of the hardware vendors are using IPMI for LOM (Lights Out Management), you can aggregate your monitoring to either another host or a virtual server running on the ESXi and pull the information from the network instead. By removing the service console, the ESXi is also a lot more secure since there are less software which can be exploited and just a few services available from the network. Naturally, if you make the service console available only from a dedicated management network, you are home free, but that is not an option on a number of installations.
Managing ESXi is just as easy as the VirtualCenter Infrastructure Client (VIC) handles all the necessary configuration options. Rebooting the ESX host is a thing of the past as long as you don’t change the iSCSI host identification. Adding new network switches and storage are done with just a few clicks as with the ESX version. All in all, the VIC makes it easy to manage servers.
The biggest advantage of ESXi is the small footprint and the ease of installation. Making it small makes it more stable since there are fewer applications that can fail. With fewer applications, there are fewer patches needed to make it secure too so that the number of required reboots are kept on a minimum. This is important since enabling VMotion requires a number of expensive licenses and an iSCSI system which adds to the total cost of the solution.
As said before, I believe that the ESXi is the right way to develop virtualization solutions. In the future I believe that there will be few machines sold without an integrated virtualization solutions since it gives the users the opportunity to maximize the utilization of their servers. Moving further into the future, I think that we will see desktops with the same solutions. Possible not for the same reasons (preferable utilization), but for security reasons.
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