VMTN Blog

If you're interested in the newly-free ESXi, check out the new VMware ESXi Community Portal, which pulls together some of the available resources as well as being the best place to get up and running with ESXi.

Here is VMware CTO Steve Herrod on ESXi as a free download and some of the ecosystem and infrastructure surrounding it. Link: VMware: VMware: Virtually There: VMware Everywhere, part II.

The Scalable Platform for Applications

But for the new virtualization user, I want to emphasize the core technology that has long made ESX, and now ESXi, the most trusted hypervisor in the industry today.  Both hypervisors offer features, such as 4 virtual CPUs, 256GB hosts, NIC teaming, and memory de-duplication, for running the most resource intensive applications simultaneously.  We have invested significantly in engineering features and optimizing the core kernel to provide the highest consolidation ratios while still offering near-native performance for each application. 

Importantly, these features work equally well regardless of your guest operating system, be it Windows, Linux, Netware, etc.  VMware has the broadest support for guest operating systems and we do not play favorites.  VMware does not have an operating system agenda.  VMware ESXi is offered no strings attached – with no expensive operating system upgrade required.  The same can’t be said for our competition…

The Road to a Virtual Infrastructure

Aside from availability as a single server hypervisor, ESXi is also a component of the VMware Infrastructure suite. Customers deploy VMware Infrastructure to transform their computing environments from individual servers into a shared pool of CPU, memory, network, and storage resources that can be dynamically allocated to applications as demand changes.