VM-Aware

Server, Storage & Application Virtualisation!

I recently had the pleasure of interviewing some of the guys from the VMware ESXi team.  It was more a Q&A than anything formal, but it was useful for me to try and get a handle on how VMware see how the product has matured.  It was a fairly short discussion, but some of it may be interesting to some people so I thought I would publish it.Unfortunately the conference call was not recorded so I will do my best to para-phrase everything that was said from my notes.

Attendees:

Paul Shannon – VM-Aware Blogger

John Troyer – Head of Blogs & Communities

John Gilmartin – Product Marketing ESXi

nAmir Sharif – ESX Product Manager

PS – How good has the uptake of ESXi been as far as you can tell?

JG – In terms of downloads, it has been very successful indeed.  It is difficult to know how many of those downloads have turned into production installations.

PS – What do you see as the main benefits to using ESXi over traditional ESX?

AS – ESXi is incredibly easy to use and even easier to deploy.  We think that any customer, whether they have knowledge of virtualisation or not, is capable of running with ESXi in minutes.

JG – It places itself very well with SMB customers for these reasons and more

PS – As a consultant for a VMware VAC partner we have seen and recommended ESXi for the following types of customers:

• Small customers with almost 0 budget for virtualisation
• Customers that would like to ”dip their toe” into the world of virtualisation
• Customers that want to better utilise full ESX licenses and use ESXi for Test & Dev to free up the ESX licenses

PS – Where else have you seen ESXi doing well?

AS – We have seen high end enterprise customers use the embedded version of ESXi in an effort to keep deployment times to an absolute minimum.  ESXi also has the added benefit of being such a small footprint (32mb) that it makes security less of an issue, due to the tiny attack surface area.

PS – One of the areas that ESXi seems to struggle with at the moment is hardware support.  As someone that works with IBM and HP kit we struggle with the relatively small ‘’supported” hardware list, will this improve?

AS – It will of course improve and with future releases the HCL will be expanded, but it does take time to ensure that everything is adequately tested on all the platforms.

JG – Don”t forget ESXi is still an enterprise product and should be treated as such, which is why we have to maintain a stringent HCL for supported hardware.

PS – Two things that customers I work with would like to see in ESXi Standalone is some sort of backup GUI (i.e. backup from VMFS to NAS), regardless of how rudimentary. Also a way of managing ESXi Standalone within VirtualCenter without buying the ESX Foundation license.  Are there any plans for either of these?

JG – There are currently no plans for either, but both are good ideas that we may consider at some point in the future.

This concluded the interview and hopefully there are some interesting points raised.   I for one think that ESXi is a great product, especially given that there is a free entry point to virtualisation that end-users simply didn”t have with Enterprise level virtualisation before.

You can learn more about ESXi here.

Disclaimer – I do not work for VMware, but I do work with their products on an almost daily basis.

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