VMware ESXi (3.5 Update 2) is now 100% free
As unveiled during the Q2 2008 earnings report, VMware today releases its flagship product, the bare-metal hypervisor ESX (formerly ESX Server), as a 100% free download (there’s no need to buy a support subscription).
This is the third virtualization platform that the company gives away at no cost: in December 2005 VMware released its first free product, Player, and in July 2006 the commercial solution known as GSX Server was released for free as Server.
At this point the only hardware virtualization platform that VMware sells is Workstation (we wonder for how much).
This version of the hypervisor shares a large part of the code with the ESX included in the so called VMware Infrastructure, which reaches today the Update 2 milestone, so we can safely say that today the company releases ESXi 3.5 Update 2.
Of course ESXi doesn’t include VirtualCenter, so the enhanced management capabilities that it offers (like VMotion, DRS, HA, etc.) are not offered free of charge as well.
Despite that the free edition still includes an endless and well-known list of features that make the product highly desirable for SMBs.
Last week virtualization.info revealed some exclusive details about the company strategy behind this move, like what happens to the customers that already purchased ESXi, the destiny of VMware Server or the limitations in building a VirtualCenter clone (or something better) for 3rd party entities.
Not all companies seems to be worried of such limitations: Ericom for example just announced that it’s able to setup a VDI environment with just ESXi and its PowerTerm WebConnect.
Download VMware ESXi free of charge here.
virtualization.info Newest articles
May 24th, 2012
Today Milan hosted the VMware Forum 2012, during the opening keynote Brian Gammage, VMware’s Chief Market Technologist, tried to collect all the news and declarations we heard in the last…
May 23rd, 2012
Yesterday VMware announced the acquisition of Wanova Inc. a company whose main product is called Mirage.
Mirage is a centralized management and recovery solution for physical desktop images over the…
May 23rd, 2012
Yesterday VMware published a paper focused on VMware vMSC (vSphere Metro Storage Cluster), a new configuration within the VMware Hardware Compatibility List intended for environments where disaster/downtime avoidance is a…
May 22nd, 2012
Yesterday, during its annual conference in Las Vegas, EMC announced the acquisition of Syncplicity, a cloud-storage privately held startup founded in 2008 and based in Menlo Park, California.
Terms…
May 21st, 2012
On May 18th Oracle announced the general availability of version 3.1 of its x86 enterprise virtualization solution VM Server.
This release follows 3.0 announced on August 24th 2011.
All the new…
May 21st, 2012
In this post, published on May 18 in VROOM! Blog, the VMware’s Performance Team presented some of the most significant enhancements and optimizations brought to Teradici‘s PCoIP protocol in the…
May 17th, 2012
On May 15th NVIDIA unveiled the NVIDIA® VGX™ platform that will be available later this year through NVIDIA’s hardware OEM and VDI partners.
This new platform promises to deliver…
May 17th, 2012
Microsoft announced this week the new Beta version of its capacity planning tool Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) 7.0 Beta.
The Beta program opened on May 15th and the review…
May 15th, 2012
Today VMware announced VMware vFabric Suite 5.1, expected to be generally available in Q2 2012.
vFabric Suite 5.1 includes vFabric Application Director, to automate the deployment and management of vFabric…
May 15th, 2012
On April 4 Stephen Herrod, VMware’s CTO, has attended, as guest speaker, at a VMUG meeting in Italy.
One of the key point of the speech, documented in one hour-long…
May 14th, 2012
Last week Citrix announced a new tech preview for Hosted Server VDI technology that allows cloud providers to leverage Microsoft SPLA to host VDI-style desktops obtaining a pay-as-you-go monthly subscription licensing…
May 11th, 2012
On May 7 Atlantis Computing announced the general availability of its Atlantis ILIO Diskless VDI 3.2, this product, tailored in particular for VMware View 5.1, enables virtual desktops deployment…
May 11th, 2012
On May 7 Citrix announced a technology preview of Project Aruba that extends Citrix VDI all-in-one proposal for the SMB market, VDI-in-a-Box, with personal vDisk technology.
VDI-in-a-Box, inherited from Kaviza…
May 10th, 2012
On May 7 Cloud Sidekick announced the Early Access Program release of Cato Enterprise Edition (EE) which extends the Community Edition (CE) with Storm Deployment Automation and support for…
Copyright © 2003-2012 virtualization.info. All rights reserved.
virtualization.info | cloudcomputing.info | virtualization.tv | Virtualization Congress