{"id":1128,"date":"2008-07-28T08:00:29","date_gmt":"2008-07-28T08:00:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.markwilson.co.uk\/blog\/2008\/07\/esx-for-free-but-is-it-really.htm"},"modified":"2008-07-28T08:00:38","modified_gmt":"2008-07-28T08:00:38","slug":"esx-for-free-but-is-it-really","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.markwilson.co.uk\/blog\/2008\/07\/esx-for-free-but-is-it-really.htm","title":{"rendered":"ESX for free… but is it really?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Starting from today, VMware’s ESXi hypervisor will be offered free, supposedly to counter the threat from Microsoft Hyper-V and there is an interesting article over at virtualisation.info<\/a>. But dig a little deeper and, as James Staten at Forrester Research<\/a> notes:<\/p>\n

“This doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t really address the typical enterprise\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s cost of VMware deployment \u00e2\u20ac\u201c just the marketing threat of the low Hyper-V starting price.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

James’s article on the release of “free” ESX<\/a> is worth a read – he continues by noting that:<\/p>\n

“VMware has used this pricing strategy several times to help seed the market, grow its customer base and fend off competitors. VMware Player and GSX server were both made free to respond to the threat of open source and other competitors. Both Player and GSX served as nice onramps to try VMware but had performance penalties and limitations, so customers quickly upgraded when they were through experimenting \u00e2\u20ac\u201c stopped a lot of customers from experimenting with the open source stuff. The same is likely to be true here; while free ESXi certainly isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t crippled (it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s the same code as in the commercial versions) the fact that you can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t manage more than one at a time is the driving drawback.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

But the part I struggle with in James’ analysis is the the summary:<\/p>\n

“If you want a more mature solution and the live migration and HA capabilities VMware brings to the table, the cost differential is worth it.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Is it? Is anybody really failing live production workloads over between hosts using VMotion? Not with the change control processes that most of my customers use. That’s why Microsoft’s quick migration is fine for controlled fail-over – a few seconds of outage is generally not a concern when you have already scheduled the work. As for high availability, I can provide a highly available Hyper-V cluster too. Then there is maturity… VMware may have invented the x86 virtualisation space but dealing with the company can sometimes be difficult (in fairness, that criticism can be levelled at other organisations too).<\/p>\n

There’s an old adage that no-one got fired for choosing IBM. More recently no-one got fired for choosing HP (formerly Compaq) ProLiant servers. In the virtualisation space no-one gets fired for choosing VMware – not at the moment anyway – at least not until the CFO finds out that you could have implemented the solution using Microsoft technologies for less money. For that matter, when did anyone get fired for choosing Microsoft?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Starting from today, VMware’s ESXi hypervisor will be offered free, supposedly to counter the threat from Microsoft Hyper-V and there is an interesting article over at virtualisation.info. But dig a little deeper and, as James Staten at Forrester Research notes: “This doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t really address the typical enterprise\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s cost of VMware deployment \u00e2\u20ac\u201c just the marketing … Continue reading ESX for free… but is it really?<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[76,158],"class_list":["post-1128","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-hyper-v","tag-esxi"],"yoast_head":"\nESX for free... but is it really? - markwilson.it<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.markwilson.co.uk\/blog\/2008\/07\/esx-for-free-but-is-it-really.htm\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_GB\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"ESX for free... but is it really? - markwilson.it\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Starting from today, VMware’s ESXi hypervisor will be offered free, supposedly to counter the threat from Microsoft Hyper-V and there is an interesting article over at virtualisation.info. 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Frankly, I'm amazed that any hosted virtualisation product (like VMware Server) will run on top of any hypervisor - I always understood that hosted virtualisation required so many\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"Microsoft Virtual PC\"","block_context":{"text":"Microsoft Virtual PC","link":"https:\/\/www.markwilson.co.uk\/blog\/tag\/virtual-pc"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1094,"url":"https:\/\/www.markwilson.co.uk\/blog\/2008\/06\/microsoft-releases-hyper-v-to-manufacturing.htm","url_meta":{"origin":1128,"position":3},"title":"Microsoft releases Hyper-V to manufacturing","author":"Mark Wilson","date":"Thursday 26 June 2008","format":false,"excerpt":"When Windows Server 2008 shipped with only a beta version of the new \"Hyper-V\" virtualisation role in the box Microsoft undertook to release a final version within 180 days. I've commented before that, based on my impressions of the product, I didn't think it would take that long and, as\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"Citrix Xen\"","block_context":{"text":"Citrix Xen","link":"https:\/\/www.markwilson.co.uk\/blog\/tag\/xen"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1253,"url":"https:\/\/www.markwilson.co.uk\/blog\/2008\/10\/microsoft-virtualization-part-6-management.htm","url_meta":{"origin":1128,"position":4},"title":"Microsoft Virtualization: part 6 (management)","author":"Mark Wilson","date":"Tuesday 21 October 2008","format":false,"excerpt":"Today's release of System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 is a perfect opportunity to continue my series of blog posts on Microsoft Virtualization technologies by highlighting the management components. 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