[GTALUG] VMware ESXi Licensing and Quality

[Giles Orr]

On 13 October 2017 at 12:36, Digimer <lists at alteeve.ca> wrote:

> On 2017-10-13 12:33 PM, Giles Orr via talk wrote:
> > I'm having some trouble figuring out the licensing on VMware's ESXi.
> > It's proprietary - I've got that and I don't love it.  But Packt's
> > "DevOps Automation Cookbook" (2015) is essentially saying it's free to
> > use, and implying - I don't think they ever stated it outright - that
> > it's permanently free.  But on VMware's site (
> > https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-vSphere/6.0/com.vmware.
> vsphere.vcenterhost.doc/GUID-7AFCC64B-7D94-48A0-86CF-8E7EF55DF68F.html
> > ) it reads as if it's a 60 day evaluation, period.
> >
> > Which brings up a few questions:
> > - is ESXi technically good enough that I should be pursuing this at
> > all?  (I'm currently using Proxmox.  It works, I'm not entirely happy
> > with it, but I'll probably stick with it because of the licensing which
> > is more open source friendly)
> > - is ESXi permanently free? and can you get security updates if you're
> > on the free licensing?
> > - is there anything appalling in their license? eg. Facebook's recent
> > license clauses "using our products means you can't ever sue us for
> > anything" (point applies even though they fixed it)
> >
> > Thanks.
>
> What are your design priorities?
>

That's a very broad question and I'm not entirely sure what you're asking
for details on, but I'll explain what I'm using it for and hope that covers
it.

A lot of my work (the employment type, not the personal type) involves
remote VMs.  I have a i5 NUC at home with 16G of RAM that I've used Proxmox
on to turn it into a miniature VM farm.  This is useful both to learn about
how VMs are handled, and for me to make better use of the NUC by splitting
it into multiple experimental machines that aren't all on at the same time.

So - home use.

And part of the reason that ESXi sounded interesting is that it seems to be
more scriptable from the command line for managing VMs - although I freely
admit I haven't investigated that worth a damn on Proxmox.  I'd probably be
pissed to lose Proxmox's graphical interface: I know ESXi has vSphere, but
I probably wouldn't install that.

-- 
Giles
https://www.gilesorr.com/
gilesorr at gmail.com
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