Let's cover the limitations of the free version, what you can use free ESXi for and how you can download and license it. The free version is great for home or light usage but doesn't offer official support or load balancing, for example. But you do get access to a community of users for support and it never expires. You'll also get to test drive products and run disaster recovery, a smart idea no matter the scale of your operation.
VMware Server for free!!
ESXi is a world-leading bare-metal hypervisor created and provided by VMware. A hypervisor is an operating system that lets you run many servers, known as virtual machines, on one physical server. We use the term bare-metal because ESXi is installed directly onto physical hardware, rather than an application on top of an existing operating system.
VMware ESXi is one component of many in the VMware vSphere suite, which contains other software such as vCenter Server for managing multiple ESXi servers. VMware ESXi is also known as the vSphere Hypervisor, highlighting the fact that it's part of the vSphere suite of products.
VMware ESXi has two versions: free and paid. What's really interesting about ESXi is that the free and paid versions use the same installation media. That means with the free version you are getting the enterprise solution, with certain features locked out.
Support. Support is the biggest difference between the free and paid versions. What's not shown on this chart are the levels of support. VMware provides various tiers of service-level agreements from the budget-conscious to the luxurious.
Due to the limitations of the free version from a support and management perspective, it is not recommended for use in production environments. But there are some good uses for the free ESXi including testing, disaster recovery, and personal development.
The free VMware ESXi is perfect for testing VMware products such as vSAN, NSX, and vRealize Suite. They have an ESXi Evaluation license for this very reason. In fact, if you have the right hardware, you can install ESXi on top of ESXi as a virtual machine to test different versions of ESXi in your lab environment before using them in production.
Finally, you can run your disaster recovery virtual machines from free ESXi hosts. Remember that the free tier has no support or central management, though. If you are running a small business on a tight budget, some backup is better than no safety net at all.
The free ESXi is great for a number of things. However, if you use it a lot, you'll likely feel its limitations at some point. When that happens, you'll need to invest in licensing your ESXi servers. Here are the top reasons for licensing your ESXi versions.
If you need a central management view of all your ESXi servers, then you will want to purchase a license for your ESXi hosts and for vCenter Server. You can purchase a bundle that includes all the necessary licenses.
An increasing number of ESXi hosts also means patch management becomes problematic. With vCenter server and paid ESXi licenses, you can patch your hosts from a central user interface without any manual intervention. VMware calls this technology Update Manager and it's included in your vCenter Server license.
When you install ESXi, it will load into a free trial of the Enterprise Plus version. After the trial period ends, it will revert to the free version. Features such as the VADP storage and backup API will stop working, as well as the ability to manage the host from the vCenter server. At this point, the ESXi host will be running the free version of ESXi. Ensure your license key is correctly assigned at this point.
The free version of ESXi uses the same installation media as the paid version, which is used by the largest enterprises in the world. So, it's a reliable platform for a variety of use cases. Due to the lack of official support, it is not advised to run the free version in a production environment. However, do consider it for home use or testing and make use of the official VMTN forums for community assistance with setup and issues.
VMware Workstation Player (formerly known as Player Pro) is a desktop hypervisor application that delivers local virtualization features and is available for free for personal use. A Commercial License can be applied to enable Workstation Player to run Restricted Virtual Machines created by VMware Workstation Pro and Fusion Pro.
VMware Workstation Player is free for personal, non-commercial use (business and nonprofit use is considered commercial use). If you would like to learn about virtual machines or use them at home, you are welcome to use VMware Workstation Player for free. Students and faculty of accredited educational institutions can use VMware Workstation Player for free if they are members of the VMware Academic Program.
The VMware vSphere Hypervisor installation ISO image is quite small (630 MB) and contains only the most important drivers mainly for branded servers. Top vendors often release their own hypervisor distributions with their additional drivers. Separate ISOs with ESXi images from HPE, Dell, IBM, and Cisco are available from the VMware website.
Before downloading the ESXi image, check that your server hardware is supported in the VMware Hardware Compatibility Guide ( ). Be sure to check the CPU (must have Intel VT-x or AMD RVI support), network card, and hard disk controller.
However, the free version of vSphere Hypervisor allows you to use all CPU cores and RAM of a physical server without any restrictions. There are no limits on total RAM, processors, cores, or host or VM uptime. PCI VMDirectPath/ USB redirection features are also available.
Once you have downloaded the ISO image of the ESXi hypervisor, you will need to use the Rufus tool to burn it to a USB flash drive. Then connect the ESXi installation stick to the target server and boot from the media.
VMware vSphere Hypervisor has been installed. If your ESXi host is connected to a network with a DHCP server, it will automatically receive an IP address, which you will see in the hypervisor console (called the Direct Console User Interface, DCUI). This IP address is used to manage the hypervisor from the web interface.
As of ESXi 6.7, your physical server will need at least a single socket processor with at least two cores, at least 4 GB of RAM, storage, and network connectivity. This would be a pretty bare bones installation, but it would get ESXi up and running for you.
This means after 60 days you will start seeing all sorts of problems in your environment had you not applied a licence. To get a license, you will need to visit the VMware vSphere Hypervisor download center, create an account and request your free ESXi license.
You can see how to apply a vSphere license here. Once you apply your free ESXi licence, you will notice there are some differences between ESXi free and the evaluation version of ESXi, which is equal to vSphere Enterprise Plus.
While there are no limit to the underlaying infrastructure your are licensing for ESXi free (your host can have as many CPUs and cores as you can find), there are some ESXi free limitations you should be aware of.
Secondly, you cannot manage an ESXi free host with VMware vCenter Server. Besides VMware vSphere Hypervisor, VMware vCenter Server is the main management component for VMware vSphere, and adds many features such as clustering (and HA and DRS) and vMotion.
VMware ESXi is free, which is the hypervisor product from VMware, and so is VMware player which you can use to run virtual machines on your Windows or Linux desktop. Other VMware products provide 60 day free trial.
For example, I can use a physical server with a couple of really big hard drives to store my virtual machines, and get away with a single 1 gig NIC card, neither of which would normally be advisable in a production ESXi environment!
One strategy to limit the impact of this in a home lab would to have one host running ESXi free, and run a second vSphere environment with a couple of ESXi hosts and vCenter nested on the free ESXi host.
VMware ESXi free does include VMware vCenter Converter, which allows you to turn a physical machine into a virtual one. This is great for those getting started with VMware to get a good understanding of what the conversation process is like, and to get used to working with virtual machines with a minimal uplift.
The biggest limitations of free ESXi are the lack of vCenter management and the lack of support. While this would not work in many production environments, VMware ESXi free is a great product if you are getting started with VMware at work or at home.
VMware Server 2 runs on several server-class host operating systems,[4]including different versions of Microsoft Windows Server 2000, 2003, and 2008, and mainly enterprise-class Linuxes. The manual explicitly states: "you must use a Windows server operating system". The product also runs on Windows 7 Enterprise Edition.
Server 2 uses a web-based user-interface, the "VMware Infrastructure Web Access", instead of a GUI. For web interfaces, VMware Server 2 and VMware vCenter 4 use the Tomcat 6 web server, while VMware vCenter 2.5 is based on Tomcat 2.5.
VMware server 2 supports the Microsoft Shadow Copy service. (Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 also supports Shadow Copy.) Virtual machines that support this service can be backed up without stopping.
A few blogs and user posts also mention other restrictions. Of particular interest, is the assertion that backup software will fail to connect to a free licensed ESXi host. The fact that I work at Altaro, a software company that writes great VMware and Hyper-V backup software, was enough of a compelling reason to try this out.
ESXi Hypervisor is free for commercial use but includes a limited set of features. To use the hypervisor version, we need to register with our unique email ID. Once you have registered your email ID, download the hypervisor, and you can use a single license on up to 100 hosts. 2ff7e9595c
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