VMware to release ESX3i for Free!

Dustin shot me an email this morning with the news ... next week VMware is going to start giving away it's latest ESX3i hypervisor ... and yes it fully supports iSCSI SANs!

Of course, you'll still need to pay for the big daddy features like vmotion, virtual center, etc; but this is a great move by VMware to get their hypervisor product into the publics hands (like ours) before we look closely at switching to Microsoft's new hypervisor :-)

Sadly, we don't have any physical servers that are on the hardware support list for 3i ... but the list is still young and growing.  That won't stop us from testing it on our older Dell servers :-)

This is just the next step in the virtualization ladder.  VMware Server is a great entry point to get familiar with virtualization and we've been running it production level for 3+ years now.  It works VERY well.  However, the bare metal 3i hypervisor eliminates the need and resource hit of the host operating system, in our case Server 2003 Enterprise, along with a host of other benefits VMware Server doesn't offer ... and again all this for free.  So we loose nothing and gain features all for free?  w00t!

Even support is available for a low cost of $500-900 ... that's a no brainer.

Now if only VMware would give us non-profits a big price break, like Microsoft, for vmotion and the other VM goodies!  Pretty Please!!!???

Comments

[Dave at Bitbud]

They better start giving it away, if they are going to complete with Microsoft (because it is dirt cheap, not better) or KVM (because it is dirt cheap and better).

Have you looked at KVM yet? It is Free and Open Source, and has more features than ESX, such as 16 processor guests and Secure/ Encrypted Live Migration (VMMotion with Security, basically). Relatively easy to manage, implement, and support.

I used VMWare for many years, and Xen for a few less - but the KVM concept is the future, today.

I've already migrated about 20 production systems to it, and can attest to it's stability and performance.

I think it is a perfect fit in any organization, especially in Churches where costs and ease of management are needed - who doesn't want that.

My 2 cents - if that...