Slashdot Log In
VMware ESXi Available For Free Starting Today
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Mon Jul 28, 2008 01:52 PM
from the free-always-sounds-better dept.
from the free-always-sounds-better dept.
Mierdaan writes "VMware's bare-metal hypervisor is available for free starting today. ESXi, which can either be installed or run from an embedded device available in certain servers, has a 32MB footprint and gives small businesses an easy way to get into the virtualization world, with easy upgrade paths to enterprise-level features such as (H)igh (A)vailability and (D)istributed (R)esource (S)cheduler. ESXi runs on most any hardware with a server-class disk controller, and previously retailed for $495. VMware is obviously shooting to prevent Microsoft's Hyper-V technology from gaining a foothold in the marketplace."
Related Stories
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Full
Abbreviated
Hidden
Loading... please wait.
more info. (Score:5, Informative)
This zdnet blogger [zdnet.com] already gave it a spin on some commodity-like hardware (which it seems to me there might be a few here who will be so inclined) and has a nice write-up of the results as well as some good tips on how to avoid some trouble spots for those not fortunate enough to be putting this on enterprise level hardware.
Downloading the ISO does require creating an account with a ton of required fields - so there are a few minutes of typing involved. There is also the usual eula to agree too, which I need to go over before I do anything with the disc image I've downloaded.
Re:more info. (Score:4, Funny)
Virtuall first post
Parent
Re:more info. (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:more info. (Score:5, Funny)
Well, he could have insomnia.
Parent
Re:more info. (Score:5, Informative)
"3.9 Audit Rights. You will maintain accurate records as to your use of the Software as authorized by this Agreement, for at least two (2) years from the last day on which support and subscription services ("Services") expired for the applicable Software. VMware, or persons designated by VMware, will, at any time during the period when you are obliged to maintain such records, be entitled to inspect such records and your computing devices, in order to verify that the Software is used by you in accordance with the terms of this Agreement..."
No wonder no one wants to read the EULA.
They don't want the VMware SWAT team busting in on them to see if they're using free software in accordance with the license.
Parent
Re:more info. (Score:4, Insightful)
I saw this too. The way I understand it (and I'm no lawyer, but...), I am not buying support or subscription, so I'm not obligated to keep records. This seems like a piece of boilerplate that doesn't really apply to a free eval version. Is there a different way to read that that I'm missing?
Parent
Re:more info. (Score:4, Insightful)
That's completely ridiculous, the EULA demands are getting unreasonable
Parent
Commodity hardware (Score:3, Insightful)
ESXi and for that matter ESX will run on a variety of non qualified hardware. (Unsupported of course.) It will be interesting to see what kind of compatibility list people are able to come up with. It can't be worse than, say, the early days of Linux and 802.11 ....
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Really? It does? I never knew my little old P4 NAT machine under the desk with an Adaptec SCSI controller (aic7xxx) in it was such a power-house.
I guess the Broadcom 97xx (tg3) in the old Dell I've got here too is an enterprise class network interface controller. I'm all enterprise-y and I never knew i
Re:more info. (Score:5, Informative)
Not to mention if YOU were actually reading the thread YOU'D know that the GGP is complaining that he has to buy a $250 "Enterprise class" SAS controller and have a server with PCI-X slots in it, which is total crap. The only reason he thinks this is because the ZDNet blogger who wrote the "review" the GGP read is an idiot who has some weird fixation with SAS and totally ignores all the other available, cheaper and less troublesome storage options such as SCSI or an NFS mounted NAS.
Last but not least, you said it yourself: VMWare only support various certified platforms, but don't expect to get much support for ESXi anyway. ESXi will be fine in an enterprise setup you need a scratch server, or have a spare "supported" server lying around so you can be sure it will work. If you're expecting to throw ESXi on any old bit of whitebox crap and get enterprise quality server out of it, you're delusional. At the same time, whining that you can't setup a simple whitebox machine and run ESXi on it for your own uses because you have to buy a $250 SAS controller first is just uninformed crap.
But thanks for playing.
Parent
Re:more info. (Score:5, Informative)
ESX or ESXi works just fine with a bunch of plain old IDE and SATA controllers...see here [vm-help.com] for more information.
You can't put virtual machines on an IDE drive, but you can put them on SATA disks with the controllers listed at that link. You don't get RAID on any of them, though, even if they have some sort of RAID available. ESX(i) only officially supports storing VMs on RAID arrays if the disks appear to be SCSI of some sort (including SAS, or SATA on an SAS-capable controller).
You could also use Openfiler [openfiler.com] to create iSCSI targets that ESXi can use to store VMs, and Openfiler can use any storage that any modern Linux can use, including Linux software RAID. This allows you to have a VMware ESX(i) setup permanently (ESX was available as a free 90-day trial) on some pretty cheap hardware.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
As I've already pointed out, ESXi also runs quite happily on a bunch of bog-standard SCSI controllers like the Adaptec AIC7xxx range, so you don't even need remote storage of any kind, and certainly not an enterprise class SAN.
Another download link (Score:5, Informative)
awesome... (Score:4, Informative)
In our testing VMWare is by far the best performing VM platform out there, especially on the networking benchmarks. This is nothing but a good thing.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Agreed. VMware has Microsoft totally beat in terms of what you can do with virtualization. I was able to set up an environment of clustered machines for testing an Exchange Active-Active cluster and it worked flawlessly (though it did require some fiddling with the vmx files). I asked a Microsoft guy about doing something similar and they said that it wasn't possible. Frankly, VirtualPC is a joke (no unlimited snapshots? No private LAN segments? No thanks.) and without the flexibility of their server produc
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
HyperV does have multiple LAN segments (with the ability to setup routing between as required) and unlimited snapshots are available as standard, to respond to both your issues.
Re:awesome... (Score:5, Interesting)
HyperV is also Xen aware. I played with it for a short period when RC1 was released, but was totally dissatisfied with it. I don't think VMWare has much to worry about as HyperV was not ready for production in my opinion at the time.
I was able to install Xen kernels in Fedora and CentOS without a problem in HyperV, but could not for the life of me get w2k3 or w2k8 to install, while both install without issue in my Xen cluster. Virtual Server 2005 was a far better product from Microsoft, but still way lacking as it required windows as the base OS.
Another lacking part I found with HyperV was poor ethernet support for *nix, limited to a realtech driver at 100Mbit. I really don't think enterprise clients will adopt HyperV for the one main reason of support though, it only officially supports SUSE, and if big enterprise clients can not purchase support for other linux distro's, they are not going to waste their time on Microsofts product.
Parent
Take Billy to see the D-O-C-T-O-R. (Score:2, Funny)
(H)igh (A)vailability and (D)istributed (R)esource (S)cheduler.
And just in case you couldn't tell that we're spelling out an abbreviation, not only have we capitalized the letters, we've added parentheses around each one as well!
The First One is Free, Kid (Score:5, Informative)
Don't mind the $2500 per-physical-machine-maximum-2-cpus price tag on the version which actually lets you do stuff, like manage the machines, migrate them, share storage, etc.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
This isn't a smart-assed comment, but what does this version do?
I've got an enclosure of 10 PowerEdge 1955s that I have ~ 6months to play with until I need to make them production servers. I'm sorely tempted to use this, but I'm unfamiliar with the ESX product line. What does this ESXi do for me?
Replying to myself (Score:4, Interesting)
I checked out the datasheet here [vmware.com](PDF), and ESXi is just the small-footprint operating system on-top of which you can run multiple virtual machines.
So instead of having a fullblown Windows/Linux installation, you install this, and the smaller footprint leaves more resources for the guest OSes.
Am I right? And what is the software that you need to manage ESXi?
Parent
Re:Replying to myself (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Re:Replying to myself (Score:4, Informative)
their ESX software is an hypervisor that you must install directly on the hardware to start with. if you want to run linux/win under it, you need to get vmware server.
ESXi seems to be ESX without the "service console" (a linux console that runs virtually that lets you manage stuff on the esx server)
to manage it you need the VI client which you can download on their site. it's the same client for all of their software (except vmware server, because it sucks)
VI client is, sadly, windows only
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
their ESX software is an hypervisor that you must install directly on the hardware to start with. if you want to run linux/win under it, you need to get vmware server.
I disagree with the last part of what you said. The VMware Server product will let you run one or more virtual machines on top of Linux or Windows. ESXi has no underlying host OS, and is (supposed to be) a bare metal hypervisor, (god, I hate that word), allowing you to run one or more virtual machines on the bare metal, using only the hypervisor, (Without Windows or Linux booting first. The ongoing debate of whether ESX or ESXi leverages any *nix is not for me to engage in). VMware Server is a completel
Re:The First One is Free, Kid (Score:4, Informative)
I haven't looked at ESXi in depth. The biggest missing component I see is the lack of a service console--no command line. I have a few Dell 2550(?) that for some reason have CDrom issues that I need console access for.
It looks like you have plenty of time to install ESXi and play with it. As long as your virtual servers aren't resource hogs, you can save bundles in hardware. If you step up to ESX and Virtual Ifrastructure, you can manage all your VM's through a single server. You can move, with VMotion VM's from one hypervisor to another (running, if they are using the same SAN), take snapshots (and restore!) of running machines live. virtualizaiton makes your life so much easier.
Guess I am a bit of a fan-boi.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
This isn't a smart-assed comment, but what does this version do?
I've got an enclosure of 10 PowerEdge 1955s that I have ~ 6months to play with until I need to make them production servers. I'm sorely tempted to use this, but I'm unfamiliar with the ESX product line. What does this ESXi do for me?
Not sure I follow you.
Virtualisation is very well covered in Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] and I won't waste time explaining it again now.
This offers a few features which are absent from VMWare Server:
1. Runs directly on bare metal. So you have to dedicate less disk space to a full-blown OS.
2. Should perform better.
3. Easy upgrade path to the paid version. The paid version is where things get really interesting - for instance, you can set up high-availability on a per-VM basis, effectively bringing HA to applications whic
Re:The First One is Free, Kid (Score:4, Funny)
it was until it stole my girlfriend and put those photos we took up on Google Images..oh man i shoulda seen that coming
Parent
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
And well worth it, I might add. It is a proven enterprise level technology and it really will save you money right out of the gate. I'm running 20 Windows Server 2003 boxen on a single HP DL385 G3 with 2 AMD 2218's and 16GB RAM, and I'm still only running at about 60-70% utilization.
For the standard version of Virtual Infrastructure you're going to spend around $2500-$6000, plus around $5000-$10000 for 1 or 2 servers to run it.
Again, worth it.
Re: (Score:2)
As a VMware stock holder, that sounds fine with me.
Re:The First One is Free, Kid (Score:5, Informative)
Don't mind the $2500 per-physical-machine-maximum-2-cpus price tag on the version which actually lets you do stuff, like manage the machines, migrate them, share storage, etc.
When you're running 10-20 virtual servers on a single ESX host and look at the hardware cost, space & resource consumption, and management costs of 10-20 physical servers.... this suddenly looks cheap. We're running 100+ ESX hosts... this is an *extremely* cost-effective solution.
Parent
Then you don't need it (Score:2)
This new free solution is perfect for me, as I've got enterprise level stuff running virtualization with Workstation. Nobody is debating whether this is a tool to getting you stuck with VMware, because it most certainly is.
Still no Firewire support? (Score:4, Interesting)
That's been a showstopper standing between us and vmware forever. Maybe it is finally supported, but I RTFA, then I even went and RTFWS and I couldn't find any mention of Firewire or IEEE 1394 (a or b).
Re:Still no Firewire support? (Score:4, Informative)
There is no Firewire for servers or workstations.
There's just Firewire like there's just USB. He's talking about Firewire support in VMware like there's USB support in VMware.
-Matt
Parent
I've spent the last two weeks researching VM tech (Score:3, Informative)
For my work we wanted to setup a HA cluster with 2 (or at worse 3) servers running both a Linux and Windows environment for some DRM stuff. So after years of just toying with VMWare server and simple VMs like that, I finally jumped into the wonderful world of hypervisors.
I of course first tried the open source solutions, and boy was that a nightmare. First Xen, on a DRBD+OCFS2+Heartbeat environment. Never managed to get it to be stable, got either kernel panic from OCFS after some time, or the servers would hang when doing live migrations. Also tried the iSCSI way, and still no way to stabilize the thing.
Then since I though the issue was with the only officially supported Xen kernel (2.6.18) I tried KVM since it's integrated into the mainline kernel. Well surprise, I got more or less the exact same result. Kernel panic when trying the migrate a VM...
So I gave ESX a try, not really believing it would be any better. Well, it actually works, but while it was easier to set up than KVM/Xen for HA and stuff like that, it sure wasn't trivial either. I spent a lot of time on google researching the various issues I was having (who would think that you HAVE to use the names of the machines and not their IPs when setting up the HA stuff?), but at least I got it to work. The accounting people sure aren't happy with it though...
Re:Not FREE (Score:5, Funny)
Maybe that's why TFS said "free", rather than "FREE"?
Parent
Re:Not FREE (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Not FREE (Score:5, Funny)
But riding my high horse is free! So I ride him everywhere because of high gas prices.
Parent
Re:Not FREE (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Not FREE (Score:5, Insightful)
"Free" as in, "short for freedom" is not, and shall never be, the default value of this term in my head. When you go to the store and get a "free sample", they are talking about cost. If I were to go to McDonalds for a promotion of "Free McNugget Wednesdays", you can bet I'll have a happy little lawsuit when they actually try to charge me and claim "It is free in that you can do whatever you want with it!"
Parent
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
If I were to go to McDonalds for a promotion of "Free McNugget Wednesdays", you can bet I'll have a happy little lawsuit when they actually try to charge me and claim "It is free in that you can do whatever you want with it!"
Yeah, I threatened to sue when the local market wanted me to pay for their so-called "Free Range Chickens".
Re:Not FREE (Score:5, Funny)
Range Chickens? What, are these replacing clay pigeons?
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
"It is unfortunate that the word "free" in English has such multiple meanings."
Yeah, there should be like regulations and laws against that, who are we to look for alternate meanings, keep these language pirates from stealing our sources.
Re:advertising (Score:5, Funny)
*raises hand*
Parent
Re:wrong name (Score:5, Funny)
They should've just called it VMware SEXi. "I need to go fiddle with the SEXi server."
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Thoroughly suitable for DIY management (Score:4, Interesting)
Embedded ESX supports a large subset of the VI API (basically, everything that a standalone host can give you). You can write Perl or Java to your heart's content and get ESXi to jump through hoops. Virtual Center uses the VI API and it's quite possible you can write something you enjoy better. Go check out the Virtual Infrastructure SDK.
Parent
Re:Business Model? (Score:4, Insightful)
You mean "their" business model, not "there" business model; the latter word refers to location, while the former refers to possession.
They're VMware. They have plenty of products they charge (lots and lots of) money for; giving away low-end freebies isn't going to hurt their bottom line much, as anyone running a QA department will want to have the management tools &c. that come with the full releases, without needing a developer to write local toolage (which can be even more expensive, after opportunity cost for the staff involved is taken into account).
Parent
Re:ESXi and Virtual Center (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Also you can surf the web for other management applications written using the VI API. There are some out there already and I think that the release of ESXi will really accelerate this. Which is a good thing because VC could use a kick in the pants (would be good for VMware too).
BTW there is a limited built-in web management interface.