VMware ESXi freely available next week

VMware has announced that ESXi will be made available for free on the 28th of July. Not very surprising as the release version Microsoft Hyper-V is now also available. I've been anticipating this move for a while now, and so has pretty much everyone who follows the world of virtualization.

But what does this mean? We all know that VMware ESX is a far superior product than the current rendition of Hyper-V, but we have also seen what Microsoft can do when they provide a "close-to-good-enough" product. Hyper-V is good enough for small SMB market customers who don't need/want enterprise features like Live Migration and High Availability/DRS.

In reality, this move by VMware moves the competition away from the hypervisor/virtualization layer, and over to management. By offering ESXi free of charge, hardware vendors can start shipping it with their servers. Some vendors already do this, but I think we'll see more pre-fabricated servers built with virtualization "built in", ready for deployment.

VMware has the edge today with their enterprise offerings, but they sure need to keep momentum up and drive management/deployment solutions into the enterprise. I wouldn't be surprised to see VMware start supporting management of Hyper-V based VMs as well as other solutions like Xen. Microsoft has already announced multi-hypervisor management in Virtual Machine Manager 2008 and VMware is sure to follow suit.

In a few words, this basically means Game On. Interesting times.

Posted by Christian Mohn aka h0bbel