On 2/5/2010 10:12 AM, m.roth at 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. -- Les Mikesell lesmikesell at gmail.com