This first customer originally purchased ESXi for $500. It is licensed but ESXi became free only weeks later. They have now upgraded to ESXi v4 with a new license. I guess that is the free version. I purchased an HP for another customer with ESXi on a USB device. I've since upgraded them to ESXi v4, which may also technically be a "free" version. I'm really looking for a plan here to use for 6-8 regular customers. I think the customers would choke over $1000 for essentials but I could actually use that for 3 customers since they are such good customers that they are connected to my system thru a VPN and are centrally administered from my site. They have been customers for 15-25 years, starting with mini-computers so it isn't like they are going away anytime soon.

Seagate Backup Exec looks messy with VMWare. They are clearly targeting HUGE customers for their product and it has become massive overkill for most of mine. The VMWare agent is $3000 MSRP, although it is on-sale right now for $1669. One customer would need upgrades totalling $3000- for a media server (old server with tape drive), VMWare agent, Exchange Agent, SQL Agent. They still wouldn't be backing up Active Directory, but the forest is backed up at my location weekly.

At this point the customers are using the backup included with Server 2003, which is the basic product version that eventually became Seagate Backup Exec. It is less than they should have but is free. I have exported each machine and written them to DVDs so I could create the virtual machines on a new VMWare server fairly easily. Perhaps I should just wait awhile until somebody gets a package well done for VMWare.