VMware Levels The Playing Field: ESX Now Free

As predicted by Forrester, New CEO Paul Maritz announced this week that VMware will drop the price of ESXi (their base server hypervisor) to $0 (from $495). This obviously comes in response to Microsoft Hyper-V pricing ($28 per server) and as competition to the free open source Xen hypervisor.

Support is not included with the free ESXi; if you want that it starts at $495/server per year.

An individual ESXi installation can be managed through a simple interface but if you want to manage multiple ESXi servers at once, you need to upgrade to VMware Infrastructure Foundation, Standard or Enterprise Edition, which start at $995 per 2 socket server. Upgrading is required to manage multiple servers as VirtualCenter Agent is required for any management software, such as Cassatt Active Response, DynamicOps VRM or even VMware’s own VirtualCenter (add another $2,040 for VC Foundation Suite), to talk to ESXi.

So this doesn’t really address the typical enterprise’s cost of VMware deployment – just the marketing threat of the low Hyper-V starting price.

VMware has used this pricing strategy several times to help seed the market, grow its customer base and fend off competitors. VMware Player and GSX server were both made free to respond to the threat of open source and other competitors. Both Player and GSX served as nice onramps to try VMware but had performance penalties and limitations, so customers quickly upgraded when they were through experimenting – stopped a lot of customers from experimenting with the open source stuff. The same is likely to be true here; while free ESXi certainly isn’t crippled (it’s the same code as in the commercial versions) the fact that you can’t manage more than one at a time is the driving drawback. While the $0 price will encourage experimenting, enterprises with Microsoft Windows ELAs can experiment with Hyper-V for free, too. Both solutions start to rise in price once you get serious but the acquisition costs for commercial Hyper-V will be lower for these customers than buying VMware. But if you want a more mature solution and the live migration and HA capabilities VMware brings to the table, the cost differential is worth it.

By James Staten

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