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.

I have no idea how much revenue was brought in by ESXi, but I”d imagine compared to ESX proper it was a small proportion.  Nonetheless it is going to be a big shot in the arm for virtualisation proliferation.

A great move I think, as it will cause Microsoft a little concern that companies will use this as a shoe in to a far superior product.

It’’s not free yet, but should be at the end of the month, according to virtualization.info.

Here’s the great video that shows you how to do it step by step, but check out the rest of the article for more detail:

Until then you’re going to have to make do with this great pdf outlining the beauty of ESX Server 3i.

You can find it here:

http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/ESX_Server_3i_presentation.pdf

It has some really useful matrices that outline why it is such an improvement over existing hyperviser technology.

Check out the sections on security and configuration.

Here’s a picture of the main configuration screen of the now in beta ESX Server 3i:

Click the image for a full size version.

However, VMware have officially announced, the not so well kept secret, I first heard about this in conjunction with Dell servers. It is a great idea and all the major server vendors have been involved, including IBM, HP & Dell.

The hypervisor will run in memory which will mean that boot times are improved along with the obvious power & cooling implications of not needing to have any hard drives to run an OS.

This ultra-thin hypervisor (a mere 32mb) whilst currently sounding a little like vapour-ware (given that all the statements talk of “will” and “could”) is going to have all the important functionality HA, DRS, VMotion etc.

I can’t wait to get hold of this, possibly on the new IBM 3950 M2 which hasbeen designed specifialy for the embedded hypervisor market.

I’ll let you all know if there is any mention of embedded hypervisors on the stands of any of the hardware vendors.