[GTALUG] VMware ESXi Licensing and Quality

[Digimer]

On 2017-10-13 01:06 PM, Giles Orr wrote:
> On 13 October 2017 at 12:36, Digimer <lists at alteeve.ca
> <mailto: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
>     <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.

Availability, performance or maximum resource utilization efficiency.

> 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.

The Virtual Machine Manager (virt-manager) is a great front-end for
KVM/qemu VMs, and it is a totally open source platform. The performance
of KVM/qemu is great, and windows guests have signed drivers for the
virtio network and storage drivers (making them very performant).

> 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.

The 'virsh' command line tool is extremely powerful for managing
KVM/qemu guests. Our Anvil! platform is basically a customized front-end
for virsh and there hasn't been an issue before we couldn't resolve.

I think both proxmox and VMWare are overkill and not really aimed at
what it sounds like you're after.


-- 
Digimer
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"I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of
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