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.
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