On Thu, Sep 5, 2013 at 10:46 AM, m.roth@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.