VMware to offer low-footprint ESX hypervisor free

July 23, 2008, 08:35 AM —  IDG News Service — 

VMware Tuesday said it will offer the small-footprint version of its ESX virtualization software free, responding to pressure from Microsoft and other companies that are threatening VMware's lead in the virtualization market.

The next version of ESXi, which will come in about two weeks, will be available at no cost, said VMware CEO Paul Maritz on a conference call Tuesday to discuss the company's second-quarter earnings. ESXi is a basic hypervisor, which is technology that separates the OS from server hardware so multiple OSes can run virtually on one physical server.

[ Related reading: VMware Q2 revenue up 54 percent, but slightly misses Street ]

Maritz said the move to make the already low-cost product free is part of VMware's plan to make its virtualization and network infrastructure products "as freely available to everyone in the industry" as possible as it diversifies its products beyond merely enabling virtualization. A former Microsoft executive, Maritz replaced VMware cofounder and former CEO Diane Greene, who was ousted in a sudden move two weeks ago.

Bogomil Balkansky, VMware senior director of product marketing, said ESXi has all the capabilities of VMware's older ESX product, including support for advanced VMware Infrastructure features like Vmotion, which allows a workload to be moved to another physical server while it is still being used.

[ Related reading: VMware replaces CEO, shares plummet ]

"Functionally the two products are equivalent; ESXi does anything and everything ESX does," Balkansky said.

The reason VMware is making ESXi free and not ESX is because ESXi has the more modern architecture and is the product VMware wants customers to use moving forward, he said. ESXi uses an agentless model for management, which is why its footprint is so much smaller (at 32M bytes) than that of ESX, he said.

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Where Google Chrome security fails: the password
I heard mention that the Chrome OS will have some sort of encryption available a la bitlocker. If it's possible to encrypt personal data using another password or key, then it may have potential for very secure data.... And Ubuntu has an 'encrypt home directory' option, perhaps google should follow suit.
- Dann

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