| VMware ESXi for FREE |
| Saturday, 16 August 2008 07:32 | |||
|
Source: VMware (http://www.vmware.com/products/esxi/ and http://www.vmware.com/go/getesxi ), Comparison ESX and ESXi
This move will positively impact our business in the long run. Each person downloading VMware ESXi will not only get the immediate benefit of partitioning their servers but also be exposed to the possibilities that a virtualization platform brings to their infrastructure. As such, they will be ready to buy more of our 20+ infrastructure products and extend the benefits of virtualization. Customers get much more value from virtualization once they lay down the core foundation - the ESXi hypervisor.
Why is VMware making ESXi free?VMware is making its standalone ESXi hypervisor available at no cost in order to help companies of all sizes experience the benefits of virtualization. As proven by experience with VMware Server, VMware Player, and VMware Converter, this will enable VMware to expand the install base of virtualized servers, and focus on upgrading a broad set of new customers to the 20+ products that run on top of the hypervisor. VMware is a virtual infrastructure vendor and the hypervisor is an enabling technology to virtual infrastructure, just as the BIOS is a component of the PC, or the engine is a component of the car. VMware customers purchase virtual infrastructure because of the automation, availability and flexibility it delivers to the datacenter.Why is VMware doing this now?VMware has always believed that virtualization needs to be ubiquitous. We want to accelerate the day that x86 datacenters and server rooms are fully virtual. With the explosive growth of multi-core capacity and performance improvements in virtualization hardware and our software, we believe that there are no more technical hurdles to 100% virtualization.Now we are removing any financial hurdle that may exist. This is a culmination of the steps we have taken over the years starting with making VMware Server and Player free. We are able to eliminate the price on ESXi now because we have migrated our business to the set of solutions that deliver value on top of the hypervisor. Customers buy VMware Infrastructure 3 because of the automation, availability and flexibility it delivers to the datacenter. They buy VDI for their desktops because of the security and manageability benefits. A free product for mass distribution needs to meet two criteria: 1) ease of use, and 2) maturity and stability. ESXi is easy enough to use that it can be the entry point into virtualization for those companies just taking their first steps with the technology. ESXi has been on the market since Dec 2007, and we have had a chance to test it customer deployments. The timing of making ESXi free is also dictated by our product release schedule - ESXi 3.5 update 2 is scheduled to GA on July 28th. VMware believes that the rapid proliferation of ESXi will help accelerate adoption of VMware virtualization in markets we have not penetrated, such as SMB or BRIC regions and expand the addressable opportunity for our high value solutions. As cloud infrastructures grow rapidly, service providers will need for a high quality, highly functional, high performance hypervisor. ESXi is well positioned to be the hypervisor for the cloud. Having said this, VMware absolutely believe that they are offering a better and cheaper choice to customers over Microsoft. If you want to lay down a hypervisor as the platform for the datacenter, why not chose the best and most mature one that is also the cheapest? It is important to note that the vmware hypervisor comes with no strings attached, there is no requirement to move to an untrusted, totally new operating system. Is VMware reacting to Microsoft's Hyper-V Announcement and $28 price?Microsoft has been trying to compete with VMware for years because VMware gets between Microsoft operating systems and the hardware. Microsoft acquired a company focusing on desktop virtualization, Connectix, in early 2003. They released Virtual PC, a free product, to compete with our Workstation product, which is now in its sixth generation, and selling strong. Microsoft Virtual Server, another product based on Connectix technology, was released in 2005 and subsequently made free. We haven't seen this impact VMware sales.Now Microsoft is coming out with its first generation hypervisor in Hyper-V. We believe ESXi represents a more mature and scalable hypervisor while VMware Infrastructure is unmatched in its capabilities. VMware has been providing a hypervisor for 7 years, and has developed more than 20 products that add value on top of the hypervisor. The fact of the matter is that the hypervisor is like the engine in a car. It is a valuable component. However, customers don't just buy car engines or even care that it is free; they buy cars to solve their transportation needs. Similarly, customers want more than a hypervisor. They require a full solution to the challenges of management, automation, business continuity, capacity on demand etc. Only VI3 provides these capabilities. VMware has an established track record of making parts of our technology free. We released the free VMware Player in 2005, and the free VMware Server in 2006. Our move to make ESXi free is a logical extension of this strategy, and has been in planning for some time as market conditions have evolved. This move will ensure that customers have easy access to market-leading functionality with an easy upgrade path to the lowest TCO virtual infrastructure suite. Isn't ESXi the same as Microsoft's Hyper-V?ESXi has a large number of technological advantages over Hyper-V that help enable enhanced performance, a higher number of virtual machines, resilience and security. Also, its architecture enables advanced features that are not possible with Hyper-V due to architecture limitations.Will VMware make ESX free as well?There are no current plans to make VMware ESX free; VMware ESXi will be the free hypervisor for two reasons:
Will VMware reduce the price of the VMware Infrastructure products as well?No, the value of VMware Infrastructure is in the complete set of tools and products for creating a dynamic and flexible virtual infrastructure. A highly differentiated hypervisor is just one component just as the BIOS is a component on your PC, or the engine is a component of the car.Customers that buy our VI Foundation get the benefits of centralized management of VMs, online and offline patching of VMs and centralized backup to run a consolidated environment. Customers that buy VI Standard get the additional benefit of high availability. Customers that buy VI Enterprise gain unique capabilities needed for dynamic datacenter such as VMotion, Storage VMotion, Distributed Resource Scheduler etc. All these value added capabilities deliver high ROI to customers. PRODUCT QUESTIONSWhat is the difference between ESXi and VI3VMware ESXi is a high performance, operating-system independent hypervisor that runs directly on server hardware and is proven to support even the most resource intensive applications. Alone, ESXi provides single server partitioning and is managed one-to-one.VMware Infrastructure is the market-leading virtual infrastructure suite for IT organizations looking for large scale, production consolidation and running a dynamic infrastructure. It includes products like VMotion, HA, DRS, and the VirtualCenter Agent for centralized management of an ESXi host with VirtualCenter. What is the difference between ESXi and VMware Server?VMware ESXi is an enterprise-class hypervisor that offers a bare-metal architecture for near-native performance, features like memory de-duplication to increase consolidation ratios and a cluster file system for managing VM files on shared storage. VMware ESXi and VMware ESX are the critical foundations for a dynamic and flexible virtual infrastructure.VMware Server installs as an application on Windows and Linux, relying on an operating system for resource management. This limits the performance and scalability. VMware Server is popular for test and development activities. What is the difference between ESXi and ESX?ESX and ESXi share the same code base and offer the same core functionality. However ESXi represents a new architecture that reduces the disk footprint to 32MB. Specifically, ESX incorporates a Linux-based Service Console as an adminsitrative environment. ESXi removes this console to simplify deployment, management, and security hardening while relying on remote tools and open APIs for management.Are there any restrictions in deploying the free version of VMware ESXi?The free licenses for VMware ESXi are only valid with ESXi 3.5 Update 2 and later. It is not available for use with previous builds of ESXi.As with previous versions of ESXi, the VirtualCenter agent is not included. Management with VirtualCenter requires a VirtualCenter Agent, available with any one of the VMware Infrastructure suites (Foundation, Standard, or Enterprise). Does a customer need to buy anything else to run or manage ESXi?ESXi partitions a single server into multiple virtual machines. It can be managed with the VI Client, a Graphical User Interface (GUI) that is included with the product and allows for the creation and management of virtual machines. The VI Client installs on a standard laptop or desktop and connects remotely to the ESXi server.Customers looking to manage multiple virtualized servers will typically purchase VI Foundation, VI Standard, or VI Enterprise and manage their systems with VirtualCenter. What happens to VMware Server? Does it end-of-life?No, VMware Server continues to have a broad user base and will continue to appeal to users with unique hardware configurations or that want to run virtual machines in an application, primarily for development and testing.Is ESXi an inferior product to ESX?No, ESXi and ESX share a common code base, but ESXi offers the same functionality in a small, 32MB footprint that is easy to configure and deploy while providing a small attack surface area.VI customers will continue to have a choice between deploying ESX or ESXi based on their environment. Those customers running third-party Linux agents or who do a lot of custom scripting will likely to continue deploy ESX as the industry continues to adopt ESXi. What happens to ESX? Does it end-of-life?No. ESXi does represent the next generation architecture, ESX will continue to co-exist and be released in parallel with ESXi. ESX and ESXi perform equally in running virtual machines. We understand that ESXi does represent a different management model for some long-time customers, so we will work with them to transition to this new hypervisor architecture.Does a free ESXi come with support? Can a customer get updates and patches for free?Support is optional for ESXi and comes in a number of options: Gold or Platinum support for unlimited support tied to a specific ESXi license or per incident support packs that are available for purchase with any ESXi license. Since customers can always download the latest ESXi software for free, updates and patches will also be available for free.The Hardware Compatibility List for the installable ESXi is pretty thin - how will you fix this?The ESXi Hardware Compatibility List (HCL) does represent many of the highest volume servers on the market today. We will continue to work with our partners to evaluate the best platforms to qualify for ESXi and expect the HCL to continue to grow.More Frequently Asked can be found @ http://www.vmware.com/products/esxi/
|
Login
You are here :