[GTALUG] VMware ESXi Licensing and Quality

Fri Oct 13 15:23:50 EDT 2017

On Fri, Oct 13, 2017 at 12:33 PM, Giles Orr via talk <talk at gtalug.org>
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)
>

I have the free, as in no-cost, VMware ESxi 6.5  hypervisor installed on a
bare metal server. I got it here: <
https://my.vmware.com/en/web/vmware/evalcenter?p=free-esxi6>. You'll have
to register to download it. There is a permanent, as in not time-limited,
license key there. It's restricted to two CPU sockets. The server on which
I have it installed has two Xeon L5630 CPUs and 72GB of RAM. ESXi is able
to access all the hardware resources I have. I recently installed the
latest updates also available from the same place as above.

Here are a few observations about VMware.

VMware seems to go out of their way to name thing as confusingly as
possible. I still have no idea what the difference is between "VMware
vSphere Hypervisor 6.5" and "VMware ESXi 6.5". I think it's two names for
the same thing. The term "vSphere" seems to be a range of products.

VMware's web site does not make it easy to find what you want quickly.

VMware's "partner programs" are, again, confusing and they seem to go out
of their way to make it difficult for someone to figure out which, if any,
of the programs would be suitable. By contrast, we have a Microsoft Action
Pack subscription, which gets us NFR (Not for Resale) licenses of various
Microsoft products - Windows, desktop and server, SQL Server, Office,
Office 365, and a $100 per month credit towards Azure, and other things I
don't remember right now, and it was dead easy to figure out that this was
appropriate for us and to purchase it for less than $500 per year. I have
come to the conclusion that VMware has no such program. They want a big
commitment in terms of time and money from "partners" to get them on the
VMware train. I'm only interested in VMware because our customers use it
and we deliver the software we build on a virtual machine image running
Debian. Initially, we only distributed VirtualBox images. It was easy
enough to convert those VirtualBox images to Hyper-V images. We never found
an easy way to convert to a VMware image so we installed ESXi 6.5 to be
able to build and test VM images for our software.

Someone mentioned that VMware and VirtualBox tend to do better on Windows
systems. That is absolutely not true. First, VMware is not one uniform
product. It's a company with a vast array of products, all of which have
the word "VMware" in the name. Even if we narrowed it down to their
virtualization products, VMware workstation and VMware ESXi are completely
different virtualization technologies. The former is installed on a host
OS, like Windows, macOS, or Linux. It's fine on all three of those
operating systems, by the way. The latter is installed on bare metal and
can host Windows, macOS (Apple's licensing issues notwithstanding), Linux,
and even other instances of ESXi. I will be installing ESXi 5.5 and 6
shortly on 6.5 in a "nested virtualization" configuration to be able to
test our virtual machine images on 5.5, 6, and 6.5 without needing three
separate physical servers. Nested virtualization is not something
recommended for production but it's fine for lab use.

ESXi 6.5 can be installed inside 15 minutes on bare metal. It's about as
simple an installation process as it gets.

ESXi 6.5 runs on a Linux kernel. I have no idea if they've modified the
kernel and if they have, if they contribute their changes to upstream as
they are required to do under the terms of the GPL.

ESXi can be administered from a TUI (Text User Interface) or from a web
interface. SSH and the ESXi shell are disabled by default. I find it odd
that I get warnings that they're enabled and that I should disable them
unless they are necessary for administrative purposes in the web interface.
I can't imagine the web interface being more secure than key-based SSH
authentication. There are many support resources provided by VMware and
third parties that use a GUI admin client that was apparently deprecated in
ESXi 6.5 so if you're watching a screencast of someone using the deprecated
product, which only ran on Windows anyway, it will not be of any use. The
web admin interface does not have the same look or feel or the same
capabilities.

My experience so far with VMware ESXi 6.5 is that it is a lean, fast, and
capable virtualization technology. Over the last week, I have been
migrating our previous VM image creation scripts, which were mostly BASH,
to Packer <https://www.packer.io/>. Our customers run ESXi 5.5, 6, and 6.5
I found that modifying our BASH scripts to generate images that are
compatible with ESXi 5.5 through 6.5 to be more work than switching
everything to Packer and even then, supporting three VMware targets is
challenging.

I had to open a range of ports in the ESXi firewall for Packer to be able
to automate the installation over VNC. It took more effort than it should
have to do that because many of the resources that I found were for older
versions.

If you have no specific need, as I do, to use VMware ESXi, I don't know if
it is appropriate for you. Your expertise with Linux will give you some
advantage but not as much as you would like.

By the way, the Facebook license controversy you mention has been resolved
due to significant backlash. See: <
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/09/26/facebook_license_surgery_on_react/
>.

Regards,

Clifford Ilkay

647-778-8696
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