Having just left a position working on a massive VMWare ESX rollout, I have had a lot of experience with ESX and the whole VI ecosystem. I am also acutely aware of the large amounts of money involved with VMWare. For that reason I have been a big fan of KVM and VirtualBox. But at my new job I see lots of opportunities where having a full blown VI setup would help, but am hesitant to introduce this.
Naturally when ESXi was released for free ;I decided to look into it. The installation was straight forward and withing 30 minutes I had things up and running. VMware offers a Remote CLI appliance which I quickly downloaded and installed, with thei RCLI you can do most of the basic things you could do with Virtual Center, as in cloning and svmotion, albeit obviously by using perl scripts instead of a GUI. Other than the DR and SRS features this can work as a low cost visualization platform. ESXi also has support for HBA, nfs and iScsi storage. Using the VMware converter I was able to clone my windows laptop, albeit it took a few tries. Once I was the cause of problems, here is a hint, don’t change your password on the ESX console while you are doing a P2V. I’ll update this with new experiences, but so far, yeah, its fun to be playing with VMware again.
