Don't know how many will be interested in VMWare technology but thought I would post anyways because its an excellent offer^

Have fun

Get a free license for VMware ESXi and build virtual machines in minutes with this easy-to-deploy, OS-independent hypervisor.

VMware ESXi is the easiest way to get started with virtualization�and it�s free. Consolidate your applications onto fewer servers and start saving money through reduced hardware, power, cooling and administration costs. VMware ESXi has been optimized and tested to run even your most resource intensive applications and databases with minimal performance overhead. With VMware ESXi you can:

� Run multiple operating systems on a single server and reduce hardware costs
� Run a greener datacenter and reduce your energy cost
� Enable easier back-ups and restores for your applications
� Run the most resource intensive applications in production

Features & Benefits

Virtualize even the most resource-intensive applications with the hypervisor that sets the industry standard for reliability, performance and cross-platform support.

https://www.vmware.com/tryvmware/ind...free-esxi&lp=1

YOUR LICENSE INCLUDES

� VMware ESXi 4
� VMware vSphere Client

The unfortunate part about this is that third party vendor's software are not licensed by VMware's EULA to work with the free version.

Huh?

Are you trying to say that 3rd party software won't work on ESXi? If so, this is not true, obviously. Otherwise what would be the point os ESXi?

Are you trying to say that ESXi's EULA doesn't inherently give you the rights to install 3rd party software on ESXi "for free"? Of course it doesn't. It would be ridiculous to assume it would. If you want to run, say, a Windows 7 virtual machine on ESXi, you still need to purchase a license for Windows 7, and then for all of the software that you install in the Windows 7 VM. This is the case for ALL virtualization platforms, not just ESXi. You have to purchase something before you can install it. Just becuase ESXi is free, doesn't mean you can just automatically install a whole bunch of 3rd party software for free.

And this has nothing to do with ESXi's EULA. The EULA's of all the software that you want to install pretty much say that you need to purchase a license before you can install it. ESXi's EULA can't "override" the licensing terms of Windows 7's EULA.

Maybe I'm missing something, but I'm not seeing the point of your comment. You just seem to be stating the obvious, which is that need to purchase software before you can install it.

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.

I've been using ESXi for some time at home now. I was able to buy 2 x ML115-G5 servers quite cheaply when Hewlett Packard were doing a deal a while back. I've upgraded them to 8Gb of RAM and added a couple of 1TB hard disks to each. I also picked up a 24 port gigabit managed switch on Ebay.

Not sure how this topic ties into Travel Technology - though perhaps if I install a VPN server (or Windows Home server even) on a virtual machine then I should be able to connect to my home network if my flight offers Internet access

Example

No, I am saying you can not inherently do the things with ESXi free that you can do with other free hypervisors, such as the example above. You can not do a production level backup of the VMs on top of this hardware, which makes ESXi essentially useless to a production environment.

I completely disagree. Just because you cannot do a backup of the VM doesn't make it useless in a production environment. You can still do traditional backups within the VM in the same manner that you backup physical servers. I have plenty of customers using both ESXi and Hyper-V Server (Microsoft's free hypervisor) in production environments and have their VM guests integrated with their existing backup solution quite happily.

Your example is correct though, in that Microsoft's free bare metal hypervisor, Hyper-V Server, has the advantage over ESXi in this area because you can do VM-level backups on Hyper-V Server using System Center Data Protection Manager.

Which is exactly why you see articles such as "Will VMware become the next Novell?". VMware charges a premium for its hypervisor and has absolutely no management story for the workloads that are being virtualized, while Microsoft is giving away the hypervisor for free and have have a very comprehensive management story, for both Microsoft workloads and many 3rd party workloads.

The more commoditized hypervisors become, the more trouble VMware is in. I know people that worked for VMware and have since left that told me that VMware is secretly extremely concerned about the commoditization of the hypervisor and the significant advantage that Microsoft has over VMware with its management story.

I am talking about the advantages of hypervisor specific things like you mentioned. Yes, of course you can still do backup the traditional way, but then you waste the ROI you build by not reducing all of the management functionality. Ironically, I will be in Cincinnati tomorrow talking to customers about this topic