VMware gives its ESXi Hypervisor away for free

Davey Winder
Tuesday, 29 July 2008 02:52

Business IT - Technology

According to Gartner Vice President Distinguished Analyst Tom Bittman, “Virtualization is one of the most impactful trends in computing. The availability of free hypervisors will undoubtedly grow the market and provide a compelling reason for companies that have not virtualized their environment to begin doing so.

This is especially true for small to medium business customers and customers in emerging markets. The hypervisor itself is really just a foundation. The business model and real value in virtualization is evolving toward a virtualized infrastructure and the management and automation tools leveraging the hypervisor.”

Of course, whether giving away ESXi for free will be enough to keep the Microsoft wolf from the door, with its Hyper-V hypervisor, remains to be seen. Now that Microsoft has committed itself to the virtualisation market, existing players have to take it seriously.

The VMware response has certainly been quick, but it isn't the only free hypervisor around. Citrix already has the open source Xen available for nothing, for example.

Where VMware hopes to steal, and perhaps seal, the deal is by offering a mature and established solution on a no-cost basis. Only time will tell if the strategy is successful.