VMware ESXi Available For Free Starting Today 241
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."
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!"
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).
Re:more info. (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 it!
Or perhaps you just haven't read the hardware compatibility lists? Yeah, I guess that's more likely.
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?
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:more info. (Score:4, Insightful)
That's completely ridiculous, the EULA demands are getting unreasonable