But there are some good uses for the free ESXi including testing, disaster recovery, and personal development. What's Great About the Free Version of ESXi?ĭue to the limitations of the free version from a support and management perspective, it is not recommended for use in production environments.

Within the paid version that service is called vCenter Server - it makes day-to-day administration, monitoring, and patching easier. However, it doesn't allow central management. The free version of ESXi is perfect for development and testing of small sets of applications for development purposes. VMware provides various tiers of service-level agreements from the budget-conscious to the luxurious.Ĭentral Management. What's not shown on this chart are the levels of support. Support is the biggest difference between the free and paid versions. Looking at the chart above, there are two key features missing that limit its use in a production environment: support and central management. Here's a comparison of the features you get with free and paid: That means with the free version you are getting the enterprise solution, with certain features locked out. What's really interesting about ESXi is that the free and paid versions use the same installation media. VMware ESXi has two versions: free and paid. VMware ESXi is also known as the vSphere Hypervisor, highlighting the fact that it's part of the vSphere suite of products. VMware ESXi is one component of many in the VMware vSphere suite, which contains other software such as vCenter Server for managing multiple ESXi servers. We use the term bare-metal because ESXi is installed directly onto physical hardware, rather than an application on top of an existing operating system. A hypervisor is an operating system that lets you run many servers, known as virtual machines, on one physical server. What is VMware ESXi?ĮSXi is a world-leading bare-metal hypervisor created and provided by VMware. You'll also get to test drive products and run disaster recovery, a smart idea no matter the scale of your operation. But you do get access to a community of users for support and it never expires. The free version is great for home or light usage but doesn't offer official support or load balancing, for example. Let's cover the limitations of the free version, what you can use free ESXi for and how you can download and license it.

VMware offers various paid versions of ESXi, but also provides a free version available for anyone to use. IT professionals regard ESXi as the go-to hypervisor for running virtual machines - and it's available for free.

VMware's ESXi is the world's leading virtualization hypervisor.

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