[CentOS] Help with VMware ESXi manager for CentOS - newbie level

Les Mikesell lesmikesell at gmail.com
Thu Sep 5 16:04:51 UTC 2013


On Thu, Sep 5, 2013 at 10:46 AM,  <m.roth at 5-cent.us> wrote:

>>> but VMware ESXi 5.x is very crippled in its free configuration, with
> draconian limits on how much RAM is allowed before you have to start
> paying for licenses.
>>
>> I'd look at it the other way and say that the free version of ESXi, the
> client and the conversion tool is really very nice to give away for
> free...  In many ways it is more convenient to use than KVM and very,
> very stable.  But, I haven't had any trouble getting KVM (or a recent
> virtualbox) to run the same vmdk images, so you aren't
>> completely tied to it.
>
> I'd also add that the o/p said this was what they used at his job, and I
> find it highly unlikely that he's going to be able to convince management
> to move to a VM system that they're not familiar with, esp. when all of
> his co-workers, and presumably management, run Windows. Given that, I
> think the answers he needs are how to deal with VMware ESXi as it is.

I wouldn't expect them to change overnight, but when they eventually
buy a server with more than 32G RAM, it may be valuable to know how to
continue running the VMs for free...  Meanwhile, if they use
exchange/outlook or other windows tools internally, that's one less
battle to fight if you use the same desktop as everyone else and there
is very little disadvantage to doing your real work via NX/freenx.
Your desktop PC most likely already has a paid windows license anyway
- if it is moderately hefty you can run vmware player there for some
things and spin the images back and forth to esxi with the conversion
tool.

> And yes, I'm well aware that ESXi is a modified version of, mmm, is it
> still RHEL 3, or have they gone up yet?

The linux components were just for the shell-level interaction and I
think they are mostly gone now.   In any case, they don't have
security updates nearly as often as RHEL/Centos pushes a new kernel
which is an advantage for uptime on the guests.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
     lesmikesell at gmail.com



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