I thought ESXi was free?

[ziggo0]

I decided to build a whitebox to learn ESXi on and meanwhile I see the 60 day trial, is it only a 60 day trial and that's it? I have a handful of friends going on about how they deploy ESXi here and there for free and not think on it twice...or am I misinterpreting the website?

 

[ND40oz]

Go over to the website, create an account and sign up for the free version and they'll give you the keys.

 

[cyr0n_k0r]

esxi the hypervisor is free
all the management is not.

 

[ziggo0]

esxi the hypervisor is free
all the management is not.

Ahh so vSphere isn't free but ESXi is...that makes better sense.

I'm looking in my account and see that I'm evaluating VMware vSphere for 60 days, but that's it.

Edit: Nevermind...I'm just really confused. I see this:

When I click the "Get our free hypervisor" one I notice a key right above the download section now, I added that to my ESXi server through vSphere and no longer get the 60 day nag message.

 

[schizrade]

Vsphere is where the magic happens.

 

[ziggo0]

Well crap...that sucks. I don't have that kinda money for home use lol

 

[Grentz]

ESXi free has some limitations, but it is usually fine for home/lab use. You get the stripped down management console that is fine for managing a single host.

Xenserver and Hyper-V are much more fully featured in their free versions.

 

[ziggo0]

I built this setup to learn ESXi w/ passthrough more or less, with the ultimate goal of setting it up as an AIO computer in the end (NAS, HTPC, VM machine). I just want to be able to passthrough a raid card to a NAS in the end really.

 

[tonyb]

You can do passthrough with the free version of ESXi (as long as your processor/motherboard supports it). The limit for vSphere 4 hypervisor (ESXi 5.x) is that you're limited to 32 GB of physical RAM. Free ESXi 4.x was limited to 256 GB. Go figure.

 

[ziggo0]

Right, it just seems like you have to wade through a bunch of crap to get to a clear answer. It's working great right now all except for PCI passthrough of the onboard sata controller...for some reason it it passes through everything from the onboard sata controller to the PCIe add in sata controller I have. When I send through something in a PCI/PCIe slot it puts just that through, I think I read somewhere about onboard sata controllers not always going through correctly.

Just gives me a reason to buy new toys, IBM raid controller, intel dual gigabit nic, another switch, funn.