On 2/5/2010 10:12 AM, m.roth@5-cent.us wrote:
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?
Esx(i) is pretty lightweight on the host side. There's no GUI at all and not much you can actually do there. The vcenter client is a fairly complex application - probably non-trivial to port and maintain lots of different versions. If you're going to lose a percentage of customers based on not having an appropriate platform to run the client - well you can do the math - they aren't dumb.
Anyway, the client doesn't need to be connected for normal operation and you can connect from different clients, so they don't have to be on a particularly reliable machine.