ESXi is free, but usable on one system. ESX is the full-blown version, costs, and I *think* comes with the console... which, for some unknown reason, is WinDoze *only*.
I believe both can be administered via browser.
maybe because there are more windows users that Linux and / or Mac OS X and FreeBSD.
i have read in [1] and [2] that even RedHat may do the same thing (a Wind0w$ only console)
<snip> Except that VMware is *based* on RHEL. Why would you *not* have a Linux-based console?
mark