VMware gives its ESXi Hypervisor away for free

Davey Winder
Tuesday, 29 July 2008 02:52

Business IT - Technology

Virtualisation is certainly one of the hot technologies of the moment, and VMware is certainly at the top of the vendor tree. Today it announced a grand plan to help cement that position in the face of emerging competition from the likes of Microsoft: giving away its number one Hypervisor product for free...

According to VMware the stand-alone ESXi hypervisor will immediately become available at no cost to companies of all size. Although obviously the intention is to attract the smaller companies with smaller budgets in order to introduce them to the advantages of virtualisation.

“VMware has always believed that virtualization needs to be ubiquitous. We want to accelerate the day that x86 servers and desktops are fully virtualized,” said Raghu Raghuram, vice president of products and solutions, VMware. “With the explosive growth of multi-core capacity, improvements in virtualization-aware hardware, and performance improvements in our virtualization software, we believe that no technical hurdles remain for 100% virtualization. Now we are removing financial hurdles as well."

VMware has been in the hypervisor business since 2001, and has in excess of 120,000 customers which, the company claims, makes it the industry’s "most popular and reliable" hypervisor product. The ESXi version was launched towards the end of 2007, and represents the third-generation of VMware hypervisor.

So this is actually a real opportunity to get a current and valid hypervisor for free, rather than some dated and soon to be discontinued nonsense as you many might have expected. Leading server manufacturers such as Dell, Fujitsu-Siemens, HP, IBM and NEC have all embedded VMware ESXi.

Indeed, VMware even announced the ESXi 3.5 update 2 version today, which has the smallest industry footprint and meets the criteria for mass distribution in that it has been battle tested for six months to ensure stability and maturity.

What does Gartner have to say about the free hypervisor, and where do Microsoft and Citrix fit into the market puzzle? Read page 2 to find out...

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