[GTALUG] VMware ESXi Licensing and Quality

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Fri, Oct 13, 2017 at 12:33:06PM -0400, 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)

ESXi when you install it gives you a 60 day evaluation with full features.
If you don't enter a license within 60 days, or if you enter a license
for the free version, then you get the limited set of features instead.

Limited seems to mean: Can't manage it with vCentre, can't have more than
two CPU sockets in your server, can't have more than 8 virtual CPUs per
VM, no support from vmware, and probably some other things.  In older
versions there was a limit of 32GB ram, but there is no limit on that
anymore.

So for a lot of use cases, it works fine, and of course vmware hopes
you will like it and want some more features and start paying for those.

Personally I think kvm is much nicer than vmware to deal with and more
flexible.

-- 
Len Sorensen