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.
