Moving from Virtual Server 2005 R2 to VMware ESXi which is now FREE

August 1, 2008

So its no news that this past Monday VMware released VMware ESXi for FREE, previously sold for $495. As witnessed by many, this is a right move in the right direction in terms of competing with Microsoft, with its free offering of Hyper-V - their flavor or native virtualization product.

However, there are things to keep in mind. While ESXi and ESX (most renowned in the market) match in the core functionality, VMware does not make the VirtuaCenter Server piece free. You would still need a licensed VMware Infrastructure 3 Suite in order to use VirtualCenter to manage multiple hosts, provision VMs easily and most importantly to take advantage of powerful tools such as HA, DRS and consolidated backup for VMs.

Nonetheless, I am excited at this prospect as many SMBs will now really be able to get the true taste of VMware ESX for their virtualization needs. I myself have run my home lab environment previously on VMware Server 1.0 and now on Virtual Server 2005 R2 (both non-native virtualization, running on top of other OS) as the news broke of FREE ESXi, I immediately wanted to know if this will run on my Dell PowerEdge 1800, a dual core Xeon processor machine. As I searched I didn’t find a definitive answer and found the provided HCL list of ESXi of no help.

I decided to give it a try and moved my Virtual Server 2005 VMs over to another storage. Got the ISO for VMware ESXi and ran the installation. It installed painlessly (following the Install Guide that comes in an email when you register for your free copy and includes the license key) and I now had a much better hypervisor performance VMware ESXi machine ready to go. I plan on migrating my Virtual Server 2005 VMs using VM converter which is available in the install when you download the eval. copy of VirtualCenter Server 2.5, and it gives you all previously mentioned features for 60 days. After the trial is over you can continue to use your Virtual Infrastructure Client to manage VMware ESXi and the VMs. I am looking forward to revamping my lab VMs and using the VirtualCenter features. Note, I installed VIC and VirtualCenter Server 2.5 on an XP machine and it works great. In future, I plan on installing the VirtualCenter Server piece on a Vista machine.

Lastly, most companies who have paid thousands of dollars for ESX and VI3 Suite should perhaps look into creating their Dev and QA environment using ESXi while utilizing their already paid license for VirtualCenter to manage multiple ESXi hosts. There is potential cost savings there.

Grab your free copy of VMware ESXi from here.

P.S - After you have installed it, don’t forget to license it with the key received in email from the Configuration tab and License option in VIC.

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