Back in the summer (what summer?), VMware announced that they were making ESXi free.  A few weeks ago I decided to give it a go. I had my candidates ready and waiting – a pair of Dell PowerEdge 1850′s.  These have for the past two years been running Gentoo Linux and VMware Server for development and testing.

For my first attempt I plugged a USB stick in the hope that the installer would detect it and let me install to it – instead it just found the interal hard disks.  A quick search revealed this blog post.  I was of course able to skipp all the bits about downloading software, as I was doing this on a Linux machine which can mount iso images and has the commands tar, unzip and dd to hand. Remember that this process will erase all data on the USB stick.  You should also ignore VMware’s Marketing departments references to “32MB footprint”, as you will need about 700mb to install ESXi onto a server -  so a 1GB USB stick to you and me.

With in a few moments I had an ESXi server booted up. Using the menu on the servers to enter my IP details, and set a root password, I was then able to browse (https://) to the server and download the client software from the server.  Although, as the client software is identical to that for VMware Infrastructure, I already had a copy installed.  If your wondering what firewall ports you need open to access the ESXi server then it’s TCP 443, 902 and 8333.

Next step was to create a datastore. To do this I had to erase my existing hard disks to create some VMFS volume’s.  Now to install an OS onto a new virtual machine you either need the CD in the local drive of the ESXi server, or the client machine. Alternatively, you can browse to the datastore and upload an ISO file. Personally I took advantage of the NFS support in ESXi and used a nearby Linux server which has some free disk space. This means I can download the ISO’s onto the Linux server straight from the web, rather than having to upload them, as well as share those ISO’s between the two servers.  If your not that confident with Linux then you could probably download and use a copy of FreeNAS on a spare server to perform this task.

This free version of ESXi has support for NFS, as well as SAN’s (FibreChannel and iSCSI). One configuration pointer is to setup NTP on the server so that your Virtual machines (once you have Vmware tools installed) are able to keep good time. On the networking side, as with the paid for ESX/ESXi, you are able to use VLAN trunks into the servers from your network switches.

I was also impressed that I could use the VMware Converter on my paid for VirtualCenter server to copy shutdown VM’s from my paid for ESX servers into my free ESXi servers.  To a copy of a running machine then I simply cloned it on the paid for ESX server and exported the clone.  Although this is more features of Vmware Infrastructure/VirtualCenter than of this free ESXi product.  You can download a free starter edition of VMware Converter which should allow you to convert existing physical machines.

There are of course some limitations, you can’t add your Free ESXi servers  into VirtualCenter (if you have it), which means that you have to manage them by connecting directly to the server with the client software, this then of course means that you need accounts on the server (unless your happy just to use the root account). Once you have put your license key into ESXi then it removes the evaluation messages, but it also disables VMware Consolidated backup (vcb) support.  Without vcb and without a copy of VMware Converter Enterprise, then I can’t see any obvious way to get copies of your VM’s out.

To me it looks like this free ESXi is perfect for anyone starting to look at visualization, or looking to use it for development purposes (where you are dedicating server hardware to the task). It’s also an easier migration path than using VMWare Server, you can effectively turn the server into a full blown ESXi server by just changing the license key.  However, there is still potentially the issue of your VM’s being locked in – if you chose to give up on ESXi completely, but thats not much different to the lock-in from using physical server(s).

There is still of course a place for VMware server, it is perfect for running on a laptop or workstation, as it runs on top of the host OS and so will run on most hardware. We use VMware server on laptops for technical training courses, in fact we will be using it later in October for this event.

If your looking to see if your spare bit of tin will run ESXi then look here 

VMware ESXi can be downloaded from here

Tags: freenas, linux, nas, vlan, VMware ESX, VMware Server

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 2nd, 2008 at 11:31 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.