VMware Releases ESXi for FREE!
Wow! VMware has released a version of their bare-metal hypervisor for free! It is VMware ESXi, and it will install directly on your hardware, and can be managed with VMware VirtualCenter Server. It fact it can be managed together with an existing ESXserver cluster. This is cool stuff!
They have also announced a new version of their VMware Server free product, which installs on top of an existing operating system. More info on that here:
“Run all your production applications at near-native performance on VMware’s next-generation OS-independent hypervisor, now available for free. VMware ESXi has the same functionality and performance as VMware ESX but with a 32 MB disk footprint. With the ability to seamlessly upgrade to VMware Infrastructure 3, customers can add the benefits of server consolidation, automatic load balancing and business continuity to VMware ESXi.”