Originally Posted by
anotherbrian
Why is ESXi free? Is it a promotional thing, or is it a strategy of VMware?
I don't pay much attention to virtualization software, but bought Workstation when I needed to do some development on a couple flavors of Linux and wanted to use my existing work laptop. Eventually I got a dedicated dev machine, and ran Linux guests on a Windows host.
A quick search showed ESXi is a bare-metal hypervisor. I know there is a lot of competition in the market, but enough to give it away? I don't get any joy running my VM's on Windows on the dev machine, so is there any reason I shouldn't abandon Workstation for a free ESXi (I'm assuming I could still NAT my network?).
Most of the hypervisors are free these days. The ESXi version is a bare-metal embedded one but one can also acquire regular various server version (note that the names are slightly different in the new versions, but the concept remains the same) for free.
The virtualization companies have shifted their efforts to monetizing the management and provisioning aspects of the platform rather than the hypervisor. The
hypervisor is a commodity that has pretty much zero differentiating value value now.