VMWare ESXi For Free.99

Today, VMware released one of their most popular enterprise products for free to the masses. With competition from the free (for lower end versions) XenServer suite, and from the free-if-you-buy-Server-2008 Hyper-V from Microsoft, I'm guessing VMware is feeling the heat. If you're new to virtualization and it's benefits, I wrote about it in general terms previously. Check out what I think just a few of the benefits to virtualization are.

VMware ESXi is what is called a bare-metal virtualization engine. Basically, that means it doesn't require an operating system. It gets installed right on top of the hardware, instead of being installed on an operating system like VirtualBox, WMware Workstation, or Windows Virtual PC. This reduces the overhead and gives more power to running the virtual machines. How much overhead does it reduce? Well, to give you an idea, a typical Windows install can be upwards of five gigabytes. VMware ESXi has a footprint of only 32 megabytes. I know that size doesn't directly relate to performance, but it should give you an idea of the mantra behind ESXi.

The plan is for them to give away the software to get people hooked on it, and then sell the infrastructure management applications that add a lot of enterprise level functionality. I think dope dealers use the same marketing technique, but hey, whatever works. In the end, it's a bold move by WMware to take their core product that cost hundreds of dollars only a couple weeks ago, and then cheapen into a commodity that anyone can get. Either way though, I'm going to piece together a junk box and install ESXi on there just to play around with it. This will get me familiar with the software. A side effect is that I may be partial to it if I ever have to make a decision on what virtual infrastructure software to use in the future. This, I would assume, is VMware's plan.