On Sun, Mar 27, 2011 at 9:16 AM, Eero Volotinen eero.volotinen@iki.fi wrote:
2011/3/27 Drew drew.kay@gmail.com:
Any experience with the free "VMware vSphere Hypervisor"?. (It was formerly known as "VMware ESXi Single Server" or "free ESXi".)
http://www.vmware.com/products/vsphere-hypervisor/overview.html
I would need a tutorial about that... For example, does that run without a host OS? Can it be managed only via Win clients? Issues with CentOS 4/5 guests (all my systems are currently CentOS 4/5).
vSphere ESX(i) is good product. It runs on bare metal so there is no OS underneath it. ESX has a linux based environment that sort of runs at the hypervisor level that people use for basic admin but VMware is trying to phase that out as most everything you can do with ESX's "console" can be done through ESXi's API's and the remote CLI.
Only downside to the free version is certain API's are unavailable and if you need those features you may have to go to a paid version.
Biggest problem in free esxi is that it lacks backup vcb api, so full image backups are almost impossible under free esxi host ..
If you have some money to spend you can solve the backup problem with VMware's $500 entry level license. The license gives you the vCenter server software, which can manage 3 ESXi hosts and unlocks a number of capabilities, like cloning and offline migration. For around $1000 per server you can look at Veam or Vizioncore for backups. Overall you can't beat the price for the reliability and ease of use.
Since ESXi is a bare metal hypervisior it doesn't have as many security vulnerabilities discovered which means less reboots of the host system. I have been using ESXi since 3.5 with around 8 ESXi servers now and 50 guests. I have not had a crash of the host ESXi host and the advanced capabilities (vMotion, Storage vMotion and Enhanced vMotion Capability (EVC)) have just worked, these do not work with the $500 license.
Ryan