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."
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
Re:more info. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:more info. (Score:5, Funny)
Well, he could have insomnia.
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.
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?
Another way to read it (Score:2)
Is there anything else you need to know about this? Really?
Re:more info. (Score:4, Insightful)
That's completely ridiculous, the EULA demands are getting unreasonable
Re: (Score:2, Flamebait)
Any and all disparaging comments about the EULA, as per the terms of this Software Agreement, shall be kept for a minimum of at least two (2) milennia from the last day on which our Lord and Saviour ("Yahweh") expired for the applicable sins of mankind. VMware, or deities 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 immortal soul, in order to verify that the darkest pits of the eternal pit of damnation a
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Exactly what support and subscription services do you think you get for a free download? The answer being NONE, this paragraph is irrelevant.
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 ....
Works on fairly cheap servers [Commodity hardware] (Score:2)
A Dell SC1430 will work fine. (Well, CIM's busted but whatever.)
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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.
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Yer, and? Most vendors do that. That doesn't mean that it won't work on some commodity hardware you can buy though, since ummmmm, all those enterprisey systems are actually commodity hardware themselves.
I've had ESX(i) running very well on an Adaptec 2420SA SATA controller (I was thoroughly confused about the whole SAS thing) as well as some plain PC based sy
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.
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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.
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its hardly a big deal, if you don't happen to have an 'enterprise class' storage controller available then get VMware Server which should be much more appropriate for your needs (and still free).
Another download link (Score:5, Informative)
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DirectX is your foe, and I too am waiting for something like this to work.
In the meantime, you really really really want to look at wine. That'll be your best bet for a quick way to do this. The only telling question is what sort of games are you wanting to switch over to WindowsXP to play in the first place? StarCraft, sure, Crysis, not.
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
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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.
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I will agree that the RCs were pigs, and Windows 2008 RTM did not include the final version of HyperV - if you grabbed the right update, it worked peachly however.
HyperV RTM was released a few weeks back, and was a simple update through Windows Update - it works a *lot* better than the RCs, and has sped things up as well.
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What platforms did you test, and with what virtualized OS's? I've run some fairly comprehensive tests, but comparing ESX with paravirtualized Xen, Xen tends to perform as well on most benchmarks and significantly better on some (as expected, IO, system related and SMP scaling).
On fully virtual systems ESX is without a doubt the way to go tho.
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xen doesn't have virtualised DMA so it's all software copy via qemu.. that means that ethernet and hard disk both bottlneck making the performance very substandard.. about 1% of VMWare on the same hardware.
You can buy commercial drivers for it that speeds up the hard disk somewhat (nowhere near VMware speed though) but there seems to be nothing that stops the ethernet throughput sucking the bug one.
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.
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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?
Re:Replying to myself (Score:4, Informative)
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Basicly, and it's called Virtual Infrastructure.
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
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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
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VI Client works fine in a Windows VM though.
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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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.
No, no, no, you can do a bunch with what's free (Score:2)
If you don't mind rolling your own you can do a whole bunch of management via the VI API using, for example, Perl Toolkit. It's not necessarily simple but, hey, once you've written it, share it with other folks.
The enterprise-level management tools are necessary for complex setups but for smaller applications you are able to do a lot on your own. A whole lot! In addition to the obvious stuff like VM operations, you could probably do a clone, perhaps in a limited way, by copying and moving files in the datas
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).
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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
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I can think of a use for it: debugging something running in a virtual machine. Or if you have two mutually trusted VMs they could use it as an IPC mechanism that might outperform IP-based communications.
If you don't need it, don't provision the VM in question with a virtual firewire adapter.
That said, I have no idea what GGP wanted with 1394 support.
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Eric Heck told me to use redirectors to do USB and Firewire.
Uh, X? Remote Desktop? Ssh? (Score:2)
Aside from the occasional maintenance task (like if you have misconfigured your network) there's no reason you want *want* to use the VMware console. Just like any other server that's not right under your desk, you'll be using X or RDC. Or a command line via ssh.
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OK, so which of those remote access systems (X, MS Remote Desktop, or ssh) allow you to plug in a Firewire drive on the client machine and have it show up as a local drive on the the server (remote machine)?
RDP lets you see it as a network drive, and that still works fine even if the remote machine is a VM running under ESX. Neither of the others support any kind of "client drive visible on the remote machine" setup.
The problem is that ESX isn't like other virtualization systems where you have virtualizati
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Okay, so when I plug it in (remembering that USB and FireWire are nothing like a serial port, except that bit about sole ownership by one process when in use) how do I specify without using the console that this time VM12 gets to use the device, and next time VM01 gets the device? Provided there's no fancy scipts involved.
Sure, if you're only virt'ing one machine, then always plugging it in and having it show up on the guest is fine, but what about when you run more than one machine? I'm not going to cons
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You want a drive in your desktop machine to show up on your server? Um. As a local drive? Okay, that's not the way you would normally get things done, but let's go with it. Anyway you can export/share the drive from your desktop (be it Windows, Linux, or Mac) and then mount it from your VM as CIFS, or whatever, from Windows/Linux/Solaris. Assuming you don't have some horked up domain setup it should work fine.
Okay, let's see.
Yup works.
I don't know exactly what you have in mind here though. What are you moun
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Why is VMWare on the laptop a bad idea? Granted, most lappy-s don't run VT (etc) enabled CPUs, so there's not really the efficiency factor, but:
I run VMs on my laptop all the time, and know several other folks who do as well. If this lead to a faster boot time overall, then I would be all for it being on most laptops. Keep a stripped version of FX3 on a stripped speedy loader, keep your *nix distro on a second VM, and your WinXPGames machine on a third, and goto town. The only question I have is if you
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When you say "VMware" do you mean Workstation/Fusion? Or ESX/ESXi? Workstation and Fusion work fine on laptops. 1GB of RAM is pretty much a baseline though (I have 4GB in my MBP for Fusion).
There are people who have been able to run ESX on a laptop. I don't know how complicated it was to get going though. However, what you would do with a laptop running ESX, I'm not really sure. There's certainly nothing to look at on the screen other than a command line (ESX) or a BIOS-like config screen (ESXi).
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Geez, Firewire won't be vanishing anytime soon. If all you want to do is run a slow ass pocket drive there's no particular need for it. You'll like it a lot better than USB with your 4000 dpi scanner though. And your video. And multichannel (24+) audio, which really won't function over USB. And anything that needs guaranteed throughput and latency. And the option for long cable runs. And so on. Let me know when USB does this.
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Oh, uh, yeah, more specifically:
As an example of Firewire audio which is definitely not intended primarily for LAPTOPS (I don't know where you came up with this), there's the eternally popular MOTU 828: http://www.motu.com/products/motuaudio/828mk3/. No one's going to be running this over USB any time soon.
For large or sustained transfers, Firewire has 2-4x the throughput of USB 2.0. Firewire 400 is almost always faster than USB 2.0 in any application even though USB 2.0 has a nominally higher speed.
Scanner
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Have you tried (I'm totally ignorant on this one) dd-ing the USB and loopback mounting it?
I'ld really like to know if there is someway to get around that little hiccup. The alternative I've usually seen is that they do an alternate verify, where it uses some amalgamation of hardware IDs installed on the system XOR'ed with the HD ID (like in DOS DIR C:\ -- volume serial number).
Does this mean... (Score:2)
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Er... if the virus is detecting your scanner, you've already lost the battle. Sure, the hypervisor would prevent the virus from having a sexy time with the scanner/firewall, but it will still infect everything else in the system.
Far better to just run a dedicated box with the firewall and virus scanner, to properly isolate your workstations from the idiotnet.
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Either you're trying to be funny (in which case I thought it was cute) or you really don't get how VMs work, eh?
If it's the second, there's a whole lot of geek-reading you need to do about sandboxed machines versus sandboxed apps, ring0 versus the other rings, and more.
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...
simplicity (Score:2, Informative)
On each node I setup LVM, from which I can allocate logical volumes for the guests (e.g. guest 1 gets
I then use DRBD to mirror the logical volumes, so yes, there can be quite a lot of DRBD devices - one per guest.
For OpenVZ the DRBDs get ext3 (so quota works) and it is mounted on the node running the guest. This doesn't support live migra
Babblefish translation please (Score:2)
I've been using the free VMware player on-and-off for personal use. It works pretty well for what I've done with it (although sometimes the virtual machines get in a state where they refuse to start and I have to revert to a backup copy). I'm not able to find from the article or discussion here just what this brings to the table (or doesn't bring to the table) tha
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Production Set Price Dropped to $8,854 from $9,349 (Score:2)
Let's face it, if you want to use ESX in a real production environment the cost has dropped only a little
R900 for virtualization [dell.com] is still $8,854 after instant savings.
Re:Not FREE (Score:5, Funny)
Maybe that's why TFS said "free", rather than "FREE"?
Re:Not FREE (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Not FREE (Score:5, Funny)
But riding my high horse is free! So I ride him everywhere because of high gas prices.
Re:Not FREE (Score:5, Funny)
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!"
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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?
Mod parent up (Score:2)
Twenty-four years have passed since the GNU project began, and still it is extremely difficult to explain one of its fundamental tenets because of the poor choice of terminology. You have to convince someone that free doesn't mean what everyone else understands it to be.
Sometimes there is great value in standing your ground, insisting that the rest of the world change to fit your vision of things. This is not one of those instances.
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If only there was another phrase that meant something along the lines of 'Open Source' we could use to avoid that ambiguity. Then the word 'free' could mean what everybody (even non GNU people) thinks it means, and this new phrase could mean what the GNU people are thinking (ie, 'Open Source') when they use the word 'free'.
Damned if I can come up with a catchy phrase that means 'Open Source' though ... so I guess we're stuck fumble-fcuking around with the word 'free' and alienating people away from Linux i
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If only there was another phrase that meant something along the lines of 'Open Source' we could use to avoid that ambiguity.
Good point you raise. Often when the free software people are doing their hand waving, they'll say that, unlike English, other languages have separate words to differentiate between free ("gratis") and freedom ("libre"). In my opinion, it would be an easier to convince others about the value of "software libre," or perhaps "liberated software," than to have to go down the rat-hole of free speech versus free beer.
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trouble is open source isn't exactly a brilliant term either because there is plenty of software where the source is easilly availible (either to customers or even to the general public) but under licenses that mean you can do very little with it.
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I know! We'll call it 'Public Domain'.
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"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.
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If it's not FREE (as in GPL v3), it's not FREE.
Please use the correct terminology.
It's not GNU/Free.
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Yes ... oh yes, I see what you did there, that was kind of funny, no? You made an oblique reference to the Cathedral and the Bazaar and the comparison to open source versus free.
I'm still confused how one company giving away a (now) free product is anywhere close to the CatB model. ESXi is still very much Cathedral, unless I missed something.
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Marketing that I refer to is just this kind of thing: appear to be F/OSS so that the unwashed masses who are really beginning to understand F/OSS better will mistake your product for one of those "new-fangled cool programs" that is free.
Like puffing up a bag of chips with air to make it seem like more product, or making the bag opaque so you can't see how little is inside.
No, you didn't miss it, it's Cathedral but others *will* miss it. It's as good as the 'no payments for a year' scam. I truly believe we a
Re:advertising (Score:5, Funny)
*raises hand*
Re:wrong name (Score:5, Funny)
They should've just called it VMware SEXi. "I need to go fiddle with the SEXi server."
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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.
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).
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I'm not overly worried about Player cutting into their marketshare; frankly, I think VMware Server poses a bigger risk in the small-customer space (though the limited snapshot support pretty much puts a ceiling on that one's use). That said, I'm presently employed by a Fortune 100, and we're perfectly happy to pay for VMware ESX -- which is what they're trying to leverage customers of lower-end products towards anyhow.
For the moment, virtualization software has a substantial lock-in effect; the APIs for doi
Re: (Score:2)
Couple of things:
VMW and VB can use the same vHDs, so unless you're talking about the snotty little text file that you can manipulate in nano faster than through the interface, that's just rather gauche to say that they don't use the same containers (I seem to recall that it's totally programmable if one person has already done it and given you their input and their performance. Sure the mechanics may be slightly different, but that's just semantics at this point when you're talking about a front end). No
Re: (Score:2)
Afaict thier buisness model is to give away the stuff you can get for free elsewhere in the hope of tempting you to upgrade to a version with more features.
I think vmware is going to strugle long term though. As MS and FOSS keep uppping the features I think vmware will strugle to find features that people are willing to pay for.
Re: (Score:2)
Actually, VMware is the current industry leader in virtualization, FOSS and MS need to do a bit of catching up to VMWare, especially Microsoft as I've used that floating piece of crap called Virtual PC and Virtual Server. I haven't seen a FOSS product that can do the kind of resource allocation and load sharing that Virtual Infrastru
Re:ESXi and Virtual Center (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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I think (as is often the case) one person is talking about Virtual Center and another is talking about VI Client ....
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Yeah and you can also port VMs between ESX, Workstation, Fusion, Server, Player ....
Converter is helpful although not always necessary. (There's a version you can download for free.)
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I don't know about that. One thing the MS Markleting Machine knows is that installed base is difficult to replace (otherwise.. well, you know the rest). VMWare is the "industry leader" in virtualisation, even the place I work which is seriously pro-MS dumped Virtual PC/Server for VMware ESX back when they had to pay for it and bought a load fo licences.
I think MS will keep on fighting, will keep on giving stuff away for 'free' (all you have to do is buy a copy of Windows Server 2008 :) ) and VMware will kee
Re: (Score:2)
Short answer: No, this is not an adequate replacement. Think ESXi == host-os. Can you directx from a guest? No.
At the very least, this is my so-far uninformed decision. Now, if you never have a need for directx or the like, sure, this would work. My advice, as I use either VMWareServer or VirtualBox (depending on the machine) is to stay with what you have.