Thursday, 31 July 2008

VMware Offers ESXi Hypervisor for Free

VMware has made its stand-alone ESXi hypervisor available for no cost to encourage companies of all sizes to experience the benefits of virtualization.

According to VMware, purpose-built for running virtual machines, minimizing configuration requirements and simplifying deployment, the ESXi is essentially seen as an affordable entry point for organisations new to virtualization and eager to learn about the power and benefits of the technology as they investigate a larger deployment with related products like VMware Site Recovery Manager.

Customers can go from installation to running virtual machines in minutes, particularly when downloading and installing a pre-configured virtual appliance. There are over 800 virtual appliances that have been created for the VMware hypervisor on the VMware Virtual Appliance Marketplace, and ESXi now incorporates a direct integration with the Virtual Appliance Marketplace to allow users to immediately download and run virtual appliances.

“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. ESXi is mature enough and easy enough to use that it can be the entry point into virtualization for those companies just taking their first steps with the technology.”

ESXi can be downloaded now from www.vmware.com/products/esxi