When you sign up on VMware’s website for ESXi and you get the link to download there should have been a license key at the top of the page. You need to put this into the ESXi console under configuration > Licensed Features > License Source. It should allow you to enter that serial number. From then on there will be no more “evaluation” mode.

Jason

That behavior doesn’t sound normal. You should be able to get a non-expiring free license, not a trial license, that allows you to use almost all of the functionality of ESXi (not including VirtualCenter, of course). It sounds to me like you’re only using the trial license, which would behave just as you have described.

After a trial, you can only do read operations on your ESXi instance. No creation of VMs no starting/stopping. That will require a license of VMWare Infrastructure (~$1500). This is the same license required for ESX3.5.

This is basically just a ploy to trick people into relying on their product, after the trial the rug is pulled out. Kind of shady.

Can someone create the Nice HOW TO’s for Backup

Thanks

A few weeks on, and we are using ESXi at my place of work, and i thought i would make a few comments, having tried out Hyper-V, VMWare Server 2 and ESXi.

ESXi gets my vote hands down every time, its sleeker and soooo much faster than the other 2 options. We were getting horrendous performance issues with Hyper-V and Server 2, not so with ESXi. There is, to my mind, only one draw back for a small company – the back up solutions. If someone could solve this (as in Marty’s post) to make it easy to backup the whole VM as you can do in Hyper-V and Server 2, then ESXi would rule the “free entry” market place in my humble opinion. And then, as the business grows or you eed to do more with your VM’s, upgrade. That is what we are planning to do.

if you are new to virtualisation technologies (as many people are), there is a whole mine field to be carefully explored, my advice?

Get ESXi and dip your toe. It does exactly what it says on the tin, its free, and if you can solve/live with the backup issues, then what a truly great bargain.

I wonder if many agree?

Great blog though my friend

Simon

You can enable ssh and use ssh to copy/backup the VM files. Enabling ssh is “unsupported” by vmware but it works and I use this method.

If you have another machine that you can use for storage as a SAN,
setup some storage with NFS. You can then backup the files natively from the NFS host.

-Marty-

I’m particularly excited for X Ops Center, because besides virtual machine management, there are a whole slew of other features. Sun has also been reportedly working with Microsoft on compatibility issues as well, so I am waiting to see how this all plays out.

As with VMware and Microsoft, Sun plans on making money off of support contracts and hardware sales of their servers.

For anyone interested (no, I’m not a Sun Sales rep, just a student )
X Ops Center: http://www.sun.com/software/products/xvmopscenter/index.jsp

xVM Server:
http://www.openxvm.org/learn.html

Good questions. Have a look at this blog post by Mike D:

http://mikedatl.typepad.com/mikedvirtualization/2008/07/esx-35i-for-fre.html

He goes through some cost analyses that may help clear things up for you.

My take is that either way, you’re going to pay Microsoft. The question becomes whether you want to use a virtualization solution that is tied to Microsoft, or whether you want to use a virtualization solution that is not tied to Microsoft. Either way, Microsoft *WILL* get paid for their Windows licenses.

For example, if I am a sw development shop partnered with both VMware and Microsoft, which hypervisor will give me a simple data protection implementation for the lowest cost.

I get win2k8 and Hyper-V for the cost of my ms dev license. But, hey, I get ESXi for free. Wait a minute, how do I back it up? Well, with Hyper-V I can use VSS and get something reasonably equivalent (“equivalent” is arguable, I know) to ESX service console backup as long as my backup software can talk to the Hyper-V VSS writer. At least, it looks that way on paper.

With ESXi there is no console so I have to run backup clients in each vm. Or spring for VCB (an add-on for which I still can’t find a price) and deploy shared storage and a proxy backup host.

But, if I add the full cost of a win2k8 license the ESXi solution starts to work again. Though many companies I’ve worked with already have paid for Windows licenses and just use up part of that already budgeted allotment when they deploy a server. So, the equation starts to shift back in favor of the Windows solution again.

I figure I must be missing something obvious. Can anyone please point it out to me?